This year we are experiencing many first with respect to planning the 58^th Design Automation Conference. It’s the first DAC to be rescheduled from its normal summer schedule to December. It’s the first DAC to co-locate with both the RISC-V Summit and SEMICON West. And it is the first DAC to ever go hybrid with both a live and virtual component.

For this year’s Hybrid DAC, we incorporated many lessons learned from last year’s purely virtual DAC. The first lesson learned was that it is not possible to recreate the full experience of a live conference in a virtual world. Indeed, conferences such as DAC attract a global audience, and accommodating multiple time zones must be carefully factored into the plan. In addition, not every activity at a live conference translates into a good virtual experience. So, we learned the importance of providing a good digital journey through a conference by focusing on high-quality technical content.

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We did it! After over a year’s worth of hard work the DAC Executive Committee finally released the 58th DAC program! And in spite of a mountain of challenges and hurdles we encountered along the way this past year I couldn’t be prouder of the entire team involved in this major milestone.

We started planning the 58th DAC a little over a year ago, and we were confronted with a lot of uncertainty on what to expect for the coming year. Would submissions be down? Would we be able to find inspiring technical speakers to participate in a live event? But we did it!

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