Check-In after Two Days at DAC 2013

I’m very tired and a bit giddy as I write this post, late in the evening after the second day of exhibits at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin. Frankly, a lot of us EDA vendors were concerned about holding DAC in Austin for the first time. Of course there is a large electronics development community in Austin, but the first time in a new location for any conference is always a bit of a gamble since you never know what kind of response you’ll get.

I haven’t seen any statistics for DAC overall yet but I will say right now that the preliminary results for Breker are just amazing. My first scan of the leads we’ve gathered shows this to be our best conference ever both in terms of both quantity and quality. In addition to seeing some old friends we’ve met many engineers from the Austin development centers we had not met before. Most said that they had never attended DAC in previous years but were glad to be able to do so in their own backyard.

One reason for the larger crowds around the Breker booth was a greatly expanded presentation schedule, including a really fun skit. Austin musician and storyteller Rudy Roberson entertained the crowd as the singing captain of the “USS Ice Breker” while yours truly made a special cameo appearance as “Breker Man.” There’s nothing better than some music and a bit of nerdy humor to get people to stop and check out your booth.

This evening we enjoyed a dinner cruise on Lady Bird Lake with 100 Breker employees, friends, current customers, and prospective customers. We featured food from the famous County Line BBQ, a delightful string quartet, and a water-level view of the bats heading out from Congress Avenue bridge for their nightly feeding. Of course I’m not impartial because it was sponsored by Breker, but I have to say that it was one of the nicest customer events I’ve attended in my 26 years of DAC.

I was also glad to see a great turnout for the panel “Organizational and Management Solutions to the Verification Crisis” held in the Pavilion on the DAC floor. My former Cadence colleague Mike Stellfox moderated a lively discussion between Neeta Ganguly of Intel, Alan Hunter of ARM, and Scott Runner of Qualcomm. Some of the Pavilion panels drew a small audience, but the crowd at this one reinforced that verification is an important topic, especially in Austin.

We still have one more day of DAC exhibits to go, as well as many technical sessions. If you’re reading this on Wednesday morning, please stop by the Breker booth for a final chance to see our skit and perhaps a demo. Otherwise, watch this space for a final DAC summary post late in the week.

Tom A.

The truth is out there … sometimes it’s in a blog.

Tags: Breker, dac, EDA, functional verification, SoC verification

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