Archive for the ‘DAC’ Category
Monday, March 11th, 2019
The beauty of the Design Automation Conference is that it is always the same and never the same. There is no technical conference like it. Every year there is the Technical Program, the Designer Track, IP Track and the Exhibition. And the networking opportunities with customers and colleagues is second to none. But each year is different, and I want to share what I see are the exciting new opportunities with DAC this year.
First DAC will be in Las Vegas and the conference hasn’t been there since 2001 and will definitely draw a larger international crowd to the event. The decision makers, the buyers and the engineering managers all attend from around the world, and my goal is to maximize the opportunities to meet with customers and prospects and inform them of all the cool new technology that Silvaco has. So, I am looking forward to that. Secondly, there are many good locations for holding customer events and meetings. Silvaco, is a founding partner of the don’t-miss-it Stars of IP Party each year and we are looking forward to picking just the right venue for the event. You will hear more about what we decide on in the months ahead.
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Monday, January 14th, 2019
If the Research Track is the soul of the Design Automation Conference, the Designer Track is its beating heart. And as we’ve seen in recent years, that heart beat is only getting stronger.
I’m so excited to be the co-chair for the Designer Track for the 56th DAC because it’s really where the rubber meets the road for systems designers, where deep and fruitful conversations happen between presenters and audience members and where the near-term future of design is laid out completely.
This year – my first as Designer Track co-chair – I’m honored to be working with Renu Mehra from Synopsys and Ambar Sarkar from NVIDIA. Renu is overseeing the back-end design topics, such as design flow and verification, while Ambar is looking after the front-end: architecture, design and verification. For my part, I’m responsible for the embedded system and software aspect of the Designer Track.
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Wednesday, October 31st, 2018
Research is the very heart and soul of the Design Automation Conference (DAC). In fact, one could easily argue that our industry as we know it today would not exist if not for the fundamental research that has been published at DAC for over five decades, as well as many of its sister conferences (e.g., DATE, ICCAD, etc.).
This year I am honored to have been selected to serve as the 56th DAC Technical Program Committee (TPC) chair for the Research Track. And I am excited to announce that we are off to a great start assembling over two hundred respected researchers from both academia and industry to participate on this year’s TPC. The need for such a large TPC is driven by a recent increase in automation research to address growing design complexity and is reflected in the figure below. The graph shows that in 2018, DAC approved a total of 692 submissions for review, of which 168 were accepted by the TPC, resulting in an acceptance rate of 24.3%.
Figure 1
What’s driving this increase in research? While DAC’s key research focus has traditionally been in pure EDA, which still accounts for the largest percentage of paper submissions (as shown in the figure below), DAC has evolved over the years to address emerging challenges ranging from chips to systems. This includes research in design (DES), security (SED), embedded systems (ESS), and autonomous systems (AUTO).
Figure 2
For example, the design topic area in the research track includes the design of cyber-physical systems, SoC architectures, machine learning and artificial intelligence architectures, emerging models of computation such as brain-inspired and quantum computing, digital and analog circuits, and emerging device technologies. Whereas the security topic area focuses on research to address an urgent need to create, analyze, evaluate, and implement embedded systems and software base of the contemporary security solutions. Finally, the Embedded and Autonomous Systems topic area offers cutting-edge research to address an increasingly diverse, disruptive, and challenging field for designs ranging from mobile devices, medical devices, automotive, robotics, drones, industrial, and beyond.
DAC is recognized as the premier conference for design and automation of electronic systems, and research is certainly an integral part of DAC. The call for contributions is now open, and we are off to a great start. Be sure to mark your calendars for June 2-6 at the Las Vegas Convention Center for what I am convinced will be one of the most exciting DAC years in terms of outstanding education, training, exhibits, and superb networking opportunities for both researchers and engineers.
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Wednesday, October 17th, 2018
Welcome to the official blog of the 56th Design Automation Conference. I’m the general chair this year, which means that it’s my job to write a blog post. There are some other duties involved, I’ve been told, but we’ll start with a blog post. You’ll hear more about and from the DAC committee members in future posts, but suffice to say for now we have assembled a great group of people from industry and academia. You can see more at this link https://dac.com/committees/executive
Fifty-six is a lot of DACs. I’ve been attending for roughly half of that time, which shows how I developed an interest in design automation while in elementary school. But enough with preliminaries. The question that you, as a potential attendee of DAC 2019, might have is “what’s the point – why should I bother attending DAC?” The answer boils down to human interaction.
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Tuesday, May 30th, 2017
I’ve been attending DAC since 1992, and it’s astonishing to me how each new year brings more and more compelling experiences for attendees. Of course DAC is rooted in a world-class IEEE and ACM sponsored conference program, but the activities in the exhibit hall just get more and more amazing and fun every June.
The exhibit hall at this year’s DAC is not just a place where exhibitors from around the world will share leading-edge technologies. It’s going to be a hive of all sorts of activities—a magnet for all attendees.
Here’s a rundown of what you’ll experience in Austin, June 18-22.
- In the second year of the popular World of IoT, we’ve added new interactive experiences for attendees to enjoy, building on last year’s successes. We have a tech puzzle for avid problem solvers, a new virtual reality experience and our very popular tear-downs . These activities are part of the popular DAC Attack game, available in the DAC mobile app. We give out prizes—Samsung VR headset, Bose noise canceling headphones, Amazon gift cards, and more— to the highest points winners on Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. from the DAC Pavilion. And don’t forget the return of the Makers Market and the IP Pavilion, all within the World of IoT. It’s almost like an entire event in and of itself!
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Thursday, October 6th, 2016
I’ve been attending DAC as an exhibitor since 1992, and serving on the executive committee since 2012. I am thrilled to serve as General Chair for the 54th iteration of this grand conference. (And no it’s not too early to think about DAC; the call for contributions is open now.) Through the years I have seen some big industry changes, most driven by the increasingly powerful tools and automation that this conference has been about — growth that fueled my career, as well!
My first job was as a chip designer at TRW, Sunnyvale back in the 1980s, and we had our own fab in Virginia, and my officemate wrote and maintained our chip design tools, as was pretty typical in those days. I worked at a series of hardware startups after that; and then took all that experience in hand to build better chip design tools. At Chronologic I led the engineering team that built the VCS simulator; then I started Surefire, where we built the SureCov and SureLint verification tools; we merged with Verisity and then into Cadence, where my team developed C-to-Silicon synthesis tools. If you’re curious, LinkedIn has most of the rest of the story, including the patents I’ve been issued.
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Tags: Adapt-IP, DAC, eda, IP, Mac McNamara, Michael McNamara No Comments »
Tuesday, April 26th, 2016
All of a sudden it’s nearly the end of April, high time to switch from months to weeks (just six to go now!) in the countdown to DAC, which I can guarantee is going to be a great conference. One big reason I’m confident is that, as always, we have an excellent lineup of keynoters as worthy of a stage at TED or SxSW as at the world’s premier design automation conference. See my past posts on Peter Stone (Thursday keynote) and Lars Reger (Monday) for a refresher. And don’t forget the luminaries sandwiched between the two of them:
Tuesday back-to-back big thinkers will take the main stage. One is Louis Scheffer, a researcher at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Shcheffer has spent a lifetime studying whether it might be possible to reconstruct the nervous system, a challenge given the boggling complexity in even the simplest animals. The humble fly brain that Scheffer studies has about 100 million connections. The success of Scheffer and his colleagues in mapping a small fraction of those connections, the region of the fly’s brain that processes vision, warranted a 2013 publication in Nature, likely the world’s most prestigious scientific journal.
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Tags: #53DAC, automotive electronics, DAC, design automation conference, eda, IoT, SoC integration No Comments »
Monday, April 4th, 2016
NXP Automotive CTO Lars Reger to open DAC Monday; time to register and book your hotel | There is no hotter topic in tech than self-driving cars. How else to explain the worldwide headlines after what can only be described as a modest little fender-bender last month in Mountain View. The culprit was one of Alphabet, Inc.’s autonomous Lexus 450hs, by now a media darling/goat. Despite the apparent and very prosaic facts — the Lexus was traveling 2 miles per hour, nobody was hurt, it was the first at-fault incident in more than 1.5 million miles of autonomous driving, etc. — the event was and remains a modest sensation, online and otherwise.
“Google was dealing with a pronounced shadow hanging over its presence at SXSW this week,” wrote Nick Statt last week in The Verge. “Now the fallout [from the accident] has found its way into nearly every transportation-focused panel discussion here in Austin.”
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Tags: #53DAC, automotive electronics, design automation conference, eda, electronic design, IC Verification, IoT, keynote speakers, SoC integration No Comments »
Friday, February 12th, 2016
Autonomous bidding agents to robo-soccer | What good luck that Peter Stone, one of the world leaders in artificial intelligence (AI), is right here at UT Austin. Stone will give the Thursday keynote, an excellent reason for you to make sure to stay through the final day of the conference.
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Tags: #53DAC, 53rd DAC, Chuck Alpert, DAC, eda, Peter Stone, robo-soccer, RoboCup, Robot, soccer No Comments »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016
Every year DAC features something new. For the general chair, balancing tried and true conference elements with infusions of change is part of the art of putting on DAC and keeping it fresh. This year one change has to do with art itself — #53DAC features what I believe to be the first art show in the conference’s long history.
No, I’m not asking you to submit that painting you’ve been laboring over, perhaps with the help of last fall’s Bob Ross marathon on Twitch. Rather, this is a call for you to send in the best, most aesthetically interesting images associated with design automation today.
Examples include die photoshots of silicon designs, design floorplans and placemats, 3-D wiring or clock visualizations, lithographic images and thermal maps. But that list is just the starting point. Really, any image associated with how our community is helping to create the world’s astonishing array of electronic devices is welcome.
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Tags: #53DAC, DAC, eda No Comments »
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