Accolade Opps: January 18th and 31st deadlines loom

If you are looking for an opportunity to express your satisfaction with a colleague’s contributions to the world you work in, two outstanding chances currently present themselves. But take care: The deadlines for submitting your nominations quickly approach.

First, Accellera Systems Initiative [a.k.a. Accellera] has set January 18th as the deadline for submitting nominations for its 2013 Technical Excellence Award. Per the organization: “The Award recognizes outstanding contributions in the creation of EDA and IP standards [which are then contributed to the IEEE Standards Association] by a member of an Accellera technical committee.

“Any individual who is a member of an Accellera technical committee is eligible to receive the award, which will be presented at Accellera Systems Initiative Day during DVCon 2013 next February in San Jose. Candidates may be nominated by the industry at large and are endorsed by Accellera committee members. To nominate an individual, visit Accellera.org.”

If you want to do something really dramatic, however, the EDA Consortium is currently accepting nominations for its annual EDAC/CEDA-sponsored Phil Kaufman Award, which these organizations frequently refer to as the Noble Prize of EDA.

Surely you know many great names in the industry have already received the Phil Kaufman accolade, including Joe Costello, Aart de Geus, Don Pederson, Paul Huang, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Jim Solomon, Ernie Kuh, Phil Moorby, Pat Pistilli, Ron Rohrer, Bobs Dutton & Brayton, David Liu, Randy Bryant, Hugo de Man, Hermann Gummel, and the late Richard Newton.

Before you download the nomination form [here] and struggle to get your application and supporting documentation in place by the EDAC-established deadline of January 31st, however, you should know there’s a certain thankless aspect to the process these days. That’s because there was a nomination deadline back in June 2012 which has already come and gone for the current Kaufman award, yet no award recipient was actually named and the November 2012 dinner in Silicon Valley was put off until June 2013 in Austin.

Surely in these post-recessionary days it’s not surprising that a Kaufman Award dinner might be postponed from the November/ICCAD time frame to the June/DAC time frame. After all, these dinner soirees are expensive and probably much more cost-effective if married to events such as the cocktail confab on the first night at DAC.

It’s not the postponing of the presentation which is the problem, however. It’s the re-opening of the nomination procedure which is downright weird. How does anyone know if, after people struggle to meet the new January 2013 deadline, the naming of the Kaufman Award recipient won’t be postponed yet again?

More importantly, how does anyone know if the real problem that caused the delay from this year to next wasn’t simply because the submissions received by the original June 2012 deadline weren’t acceptable to the sage leaders who decide these things?

Clearly we can’t know, so just be fairly warned. It’s a good idea to go to the trouble to nominate your colleagues for accolades from august organizations such as Accellera, EDAC, and CEDA. Your efforts may go unheeded, however, and in the case of the Kaufman Award may yield instead a healthy amount of disappointment, and even skepticism, as a result.

But then, you work in technology and you already know that if you can’t take the heat, you should get out of the kitchen. Disappointment and skepticism are the stuff that dreams are made of in Silicon Valley. Overcoming them, that is.

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Tags: Accellera Systems Initiative, Accellera Technical Excellence Award, CEDA, DAC, EDAC, ICCAD, IEEE Standards Association, Kaufman Aard

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