Positive news and analysis from SEMICON West currently dominate the coverage throughout our industry onlines. No wonder. Colorful and vibrant were the words I used when I described it to someone who wasn’t there. 

I used vibrant because the program itself had an unbeatable 120 hours of content with 250 speakers, 17 tracks, TechXPOT sessions on 10 stages and the popular feature, “Meet the Expert” theater. An impressive lineup of 12 keynotes and executive panels offered compelling topics that ranged from “Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World” to multiple looks at Artificial Intelligence. Of course, no industry conference today would be complete without a session on autonomous driving and SEMICON West didn’t disappoint with “Autonomous Driving 101: Semiconductors in the Driver Seat.” One other noteworthy session was the “SEMI Bulls and Bears Panel.”

Of course, many attendees came to take part in the networking opportunities and SEMICON West didn’t disappoint here either with 15 of them, along with a welcome reception and several other receptions, and an after-hours party benefitting the SEMI foundation.

Colorful is the best descriptor for the conference theme, “Beyond Smart,” which sent a signal that SEMI vertical segments including manufacturing, MedTech, transportation, IoT and data are integral parts of the conference. Three Smart pavilions dedicated to transportation, manufacturing and workforce drew large crowds of attendees.

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Enthusiasm at this year’s DAC was especially keen along Design Infrastructure Alley on the first floor of exhibits, a new initiative driven by the ESD Alliance and the Association for High-Performance Computing Professionals. The one long aisle highlighting the information technology infrastructure to design chips and systems was full of eager attendees. Many were DAC first timers checking out the offerings of 16 exhibitors, many of whom were also first timers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Azure/Microsoft and Metrics. ESD Alliance members exhibiting along Design Infrastructure Alley were Altair, Cadence and IC Manage.

The ESD Alliance Booth sat at the entrance to Design Infrastructure Alley, giving us an unobstructed view of the activities and a chance to talk with a wide variety of attendees with varying interests. IT managers were at DAC to gather information on ways to address electronic design’s unique computing and storage needs. The CAD managers we met needed to better understand how to manage and support the increasing use of cloud computing.

At the end of the aisle sat the Design-on-Cloud Pavilion full of useful presentations and talks by experts with answers to many of these challenges. A recurring theme in many of the often standing-room-only discussions was design in the cloud, a theme carried throughout DAC’s two floors of exhibits. However, cloud wasn’t all attendees heard about. Other presentations covered license management, grid computing, storage management and data security.

Credit for this new DAC initiative goes to Derek Magill, the architect of Design Infrastructure Alley and the emcee for the Design-on-Cloud Pavilion, with the full backing of the DAC Executive Committee. Derek has first-hand knowledge about the new IT infrastructure as engineering cloud architecture lead and global EDA license infrastructure lead at Qualcomm. He also serves as executive director of the newly formed Association of High Performance Computing Professionals and as chairman of the Centralized Enterprise License User Group (CELUG). The ESD Alliance has worked closely with Derek and CELUG, and for many years sponsored its co-located meetings at DAC.

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