BDA: Two different definitions at DAC

It’s stranger than fiction, but there are actually two different entities at DAC that bear the name BDA, and they’re both acronyms.

One is a company very familiar to the EDA space, Berkeley Design Automation. As you know, President & CEO Ravi Subramanian has just been elected to a second term as a member of the Board of Directors of EDAC.

Subramanian’s BDA is in the news again this week because they just announced that ATopTech, also an EDA company, is now using BDA’s Analog FastSpice to “enhance the accuracy of the timing analysis in [ATopTech’s] Aprisa P&R product for designs at advanced process technology nodes such as 28nm and 20nm..”

So what is the other BDA at DAC? It’s Biological Design Automation. The International Workshop on Biological Design Automation figured large on Sunday and Monday, June 3rd and 4th, in San Francisco where it was again co-located with the Design Automation Conference, as it has been for several years.

This was the 4th annual IWBDA, which per conference organizers, “brings together researchers from the synthetic biology, systems biology, and design automation communities. The focus [of the workshop] is on concepts, methodologies and software tools for the computational analysis of biological systems and the synthesis of biological systems.”

It’s clear that the algorithmic and optimization expertise that thrives at the center of the EDA world offers excellent companion conversation to the other BDA at DAC. In fact, inspired by IWBDA I’m in Boston this week visiting various researchers at Harvard, MIT, and Boston University who are at the epicenter of BDA today – the BDA that’s not Berkeley Design Automation, but the BDA that is Biological Design Automation.

I look forward to reporting on these researchers in upcoming blogs. Meanwhile, hopefully this has helped to sort out any acronym-ish confusion that may have been of concern at DAC. There are indeed two definitions of BDA at DAC, and that appears to be a good thing.

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Per the BDA Press Release …

“We are excited that ATopTech selected the AFS Platform for characterization and calibration of their timing analysis engine,” said Ravi Subramanian, president and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation. “Accurate timing closure and sign-off is critical to IC designers and ATopTech’s selection highlights the accuracy, performance, and capacity benefits of the AFS Platform.”

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Tags: ATopTech, BDA, Berkeley Design Automation, Biological Design Automation, DAC, IWBDA, Ravi Subramanian

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