Mike Gianfagna is the VP of marketing at eSilicon Corporation
DAC stands for Design Automation Conference. Everyone: please stop saying “the DAC conference”. This may not be as widespread as folks calling an automated teller machine an ATM machine, but it’s still odd. But I digress…
This year, the 53rd DAC will be held in Austin, Texas starting June 5. I’ve been going to DAC for more years than I will ever put in writing. I’ve seen some marvelous things unveiled at this show. Innovations that impact IC design and manufacturing typically. This year will be different though.
Chuck Alpert, General Chair of the 53rd DAC was recently interviewed by Warren Savage on Take Five. Check out what DAC has in store this upcoming June and learn how you can still participate in the DAC program!
Memorial Day has come and gone, which means two things: summer is here and DAC is officially upon us. In just over a week the doors will open at Moscone Center with a blockbuster designer keynote: Brian Otis, director of Google’s smart contact lens project. Brian, the first Googler to ever take DAC’s main stage, is just one reason to consider registering for the designer and IP tracks if you haven’t already. Others include access to great lineup of marketing-free, engineer-to-engineer sessions, daily networking receptions (yes, you grown-up undergrads, there will be lots of free food and drink), the rest of the keynotes (did you know DAC is also welcoming a MacArthur genius this year?) and of course the exhibit floor. Not bad for just $95.
Times are good in EDA. 2014 was a record revenue year for our industry, according to an April 13 EDAC announcement. Several technology areas (IC physical design and semiconductor IP) and geographies (the Americas and Asia-Pacific) experienced double digit growth in Q4. The number of people working in EDA is on the rise, too: a total of 31,735 employees at companies EDAC tracks in Q4 2014, compared to 29,880 employees a year earlier. This rising tide is lifting all boats — including #52DAC, which I invite you to register for today if you haven’t already.
Nose around the design automation industry a bit and you’re sure to find mention of the goal to “shift left.” Basically the idea is to try to solve problems and add value earlier in the design cycle. Engineers usually first stitch together basic functional blocks of whatever they are building before moving on to higher level system integration and software tasks. Turns out this isn’t a bad metaphor for conference planning. Like chips and ICs, conferences work best when the essential elements (in this case, marquee presenters and core technical content) are in place early. I can safely report this is more or less true now for DAC 52—which is slated to be simply amazing when it’s finally “launched” this summer.
In tech it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that you’re either growing or dying, on the way up or on the way out. I poked modest fun at Apple in an earlier post, but their latest financial results certainly illustrate the point. By now you’ve probably heard that Apple’s $18 billion quarterly profit was the largest ever reported by a public company. At DAC, we may not be selling 34,000 iPhones per hour around the clock for three straight months (wow!), but we are setting our own records.
Technical conferences change over time. Consider CES, wrapping up now in Las Vegas after generating the expected spate of headlines, mostly about wearables. (I have a Pebble so I can safely claim to be on the cutting edge, or at least the bandwagon.) For starters is the issue of the conference name. You won’t see many references to the “Consumer Electronics Show” on the official conference site this year. Consistent with tech’s global ambitions and love of acronyms, the official handle now seems to be “International CES,” though the media doesn’t seem to have caught onto this yet. More significant is how content at CES has evolved, even recently. As recently as 2011, the show reliably featured a slew of new Android phones. Now, most of the big announcements about smartphones — I think there is little argument these are still the hottest consumer devices on the planet — take place at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Thanksgiving is here so it’s likely to be a slow week in the EDA industry. Of course, like much else in our culture, this event has been co-opted by rampant media messages to shop and consume. Already I’ve seen lots of stories about Black Friday, mostly discussing whether the whole idea of a 24-hour window is now moot given Cyber Monday and the reality that the holiday shopping season now starts right after Halloween and stretches into January.
As a German I know I must tread lightly when writing about the most American of holidays. Turkey is not all that big on holiday menus back home and as I’ve written about in an earlier EDA Café post, football (or rather fussball) will always mean something different to me, no matter the success of the regional favorite Seahawks or my staff’s obsession with making their weekly fantasy picks. I’ll just say that I’ve grown to like some of the old-fashioned aspects of the holiday (a good meal with friends followed by a hike with the dogs, who demand to get out regardless of the weather). I can’t help but being thankful that EDA is not part of this annual shopping lunacy, at least not directly. Last I looked, the big three EDA vendors aren’t offering holiday-themed sales and I’ve never yet seen a line out the door for a piece of technical software. (That said, DAC attendees have been known to queue up for the free coffee, beer and wine that exhibitors offer almost every day — as I see it, much more reasonable behavior than waiting outside a superstore before it opens.)
Okay, this is no hyperbole and I’m no longer just trying to gin up enthusiasm. The first batch of DAC deadlines is upon us. For those of you who won’t read beyond this paragraph, here are dates you need to know if you’re interested in participating in what remains the premier EDA industry conference. Proposals for the following are due November 13: panels, tutorials, workshops and co-located conferences. Abstracts for research papers are due November 21 and full manuscripts are due December 2; you can submit in these five categories: automotive electronic design, EDA research, ESS research, hardware software and security, and work-in-progress (WIP). I hope all those links help. Of course you can find more information and everything else you need on DAC.com.
Surely the biggest tech news since my last post is the new Apple Watch, finally announced September 9 after months of anticipation. I can’t add much to the volumes that have been written, except perhaps to issue my standard gentle reminder on behalf of our industry anytime a tech device makes a splash. Surely the new watch, and for that matter the two new iPhones that were part of the announcement, simply wouldn’t have been possible to design and test without EDA tools and expertise. The world may look at the watch and make declarations like this from Scott Stein and David Carnoy at CNET: “For fitness-lovers who want a smart connected workout device that plays music, the Apple Watch could be a slam dunk.” Or this from Farhad Manjoo at The New York Times: “The biggest news was about the old Apple: It’s back, and it’s more capable than ever.” Or even make parody videos that get the predictable millions of YouTube views (see below). Meanwhile I can’t help but think of all the hardware/software verification that Apple had to do before Tim Cook could take the stage.
