Posts Tagged ‘Design Automation Conference’
Thursday, August 31st, 2017
Amit Gupta is the quintessential entrepreneur in EDA. Even as he was graduating with degrees in EE and CS from University of Saskatchewan, he was co-founding Analog Design Automation, targeted at those who need tools to automate analog chip design. That was in 1999. The company was sold to Synopsys in 2004, and then Gupta co-founded Solido Design Automation in 2005.
This week, I had a chance to speak at length with Amit Gupta. The last time we conversed, it was at the January 2017 Kaufman Award dinner for Dr. Andres Strojwas in San Jose. That evening, Gupta was enthused about Solido’s access to high-quality engineering talent in Canada, and argued that the cost of living and quality of life in Saskatoon, where Solido is headquartered, more than compensate for any sense that Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the industry. His enthusiasm has only grown since that time.
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Tags: Amit Gupta, Analog Design Automation, Deloitte, Design Automation Conference, E3 Data Science, Eric Hall, ESD Alliance, finFET, GlobalFoundries, Gloria Nichols, Jeff Dyck, Mark Gilbert, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Saskatoon, SOI, Solido Design Automation, Sorin Dobre, Synopsys, Ting Ku, TSMC, UX design
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Wednesday, July 19th, 2017
Impersas CEO Simon Davidmann lead a tutorial at the Design Automation Conference last month in Austin. Prior to his presentation, we spoke by phone about the content of that tutorial.
“It’s a simple message we’re presenting at DAC,” Davidmann said, “but an important one. If you’re a semiconductor guy building a chip, your customers want to know what components are being used, but you also have to build the software that runs on top of it.
“There’s a lot of challenge, however, in getting an operating system up and running on the hardware and the problem extends to hardware-dependent software. Even the lowest level bits become part of the operating systems. So our tutorial is about what you need to do this work, about how to get hardware-dependent software running.”
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Tags: Agile, Altera, Cadence, CloudBees, Design Automation Conference, Imagination Technologies, Imperas, Jenkins, Linux, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys
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Thursday, April 13th, 2017
Every industry needs advocates, and Bob Gardner served with distinction in that role for many years. When he passed away this week, the industry lost both an articulate spokesman, and someone who had a deep and nuanced understanding of how the unique group of companies involved in EDA and IP come together to provide the crucial underpinnings of a global semiconductor design chain.
Gardner’s most important industry-wide contributions, of course, came during his eight years as Executive Director of the EDA Consortium. He had, however, many years of leadership and involvement in a variety of companies prior to his EDAC assignment, including roles at Verific, Signetics/Philips, AMD, Exemplar Logic, Design Acceleration, Bridges2Silicon, and ITeX.
Given that background, Gardner was able to bring decades of corporate wisdom to his role at EDAC and used it wisely to help craft the mission and work of the Consortium. During his tenure, the organization expanded its membership, became even more pro-active in promoting the common agenda for member companies, and helped to expand the visibility of EDAC across North America and into Europe and beyond.
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Tags: Bob Gardner, Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference, Design Automation Conference, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Robert M. Gardner, Verific
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Thursday, March 30th, 2017
You need no more evidence than the just-published agenda for June’s Design Automation Conference in Austin to prove that the EDA industry is now a complex amalgamation of technologies, applications and markets. Not to mention people.
This year’s keynotes and skywalks cover a range of topics: From how the IoT will make smart buildings smarter, to why hardware/software co-design is being relabeled as digital twin[ning], why III-V compound semiconductors are the wave of the future, how wearable devices will soon be able to snoop around and find out if you’re having a bad day, and – did we mention the IoT?
New this year, even politics will get its 25 minutes of fame with a keynote outlining what’s up with ICs in China.
In other words, at DAC 2017 the topics are all over the map. You no longer just hear about the nuts and nuances of design; now you hear as much about what’s going on downstream in the system that runs on the IC as you hear about designing the IC itself.
There is a deeper meaning in all of this, of course.
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Tags: 54th DAC, Design Automation Conference, IoT
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Thursday, July 28th, 2016
A number of conferences important to EDA and IP are coming up over the next 12 months and currently looking for content. If you have an industry-relevant topic you’d like to talk about, the organizers of some of these conferences need to hear from you soon. Various deadlines are looming, most over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to consider that one of the most thrill- for-your-buck conferences on the list is Black Hat USA 2016 and Synopsys’ co-located CodenomiCON, both promising to teach you everything you need to know or are allowed to know about cybersecurity. Synopsys’ involvement in Black Hat may validate a comment overheard recently: ‘Synopsys is no longer really an EDA company. They’ve become a software integrity company.’
Also interesting, DVCon in San Jose and Mobile World in Barcelona in 2017 are on the exact same days. Perhaps there’s no overlap in the attendee population. But most interesting on the list, the sheer scale of the China International Modern Industry & Intelligent Equipment Exhibition with 500+ exhibitors, over 40,000 attendees, and more topics that you can possibly imagine.
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Tags: 3D ASIP, 3DExperience Forum, ARC Processor Summit, AWR Design Forum, Black Hat USA, DATE, Design Automation Conference, DVCon U.S., Embedded Systems Conference, European Innovation Day, Flash Memory Summit, Hot Chips, ICCAD, IEDM, IEEE Semiconductor Interface Specialists Conference, IEEE SFBA Nanotechnology Council, ISSCC, MIPI DevCon, Mobile World Congress
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Thursday, July 14th, 2016
Intel’s Shishpal Rawat has been Chair of Accellera for 6 years and is currently serving as President of CEDA, IEEE’s Council on Electronic Design Automation. In previous discussions, Rawat has insisted that his leadership is not what makes these organizations work. Only the enthusiastic efforts of the many members guarantee that both Accellera and CEDA continue to shape ideas, standards, and forward progress within design automation and its adjacent technologies.
Two years ago, I enjoyed a lengthy interview with Rawat about all of this, described here. This year, I’ve chatted with Rawat at DVCon in San Jose in March, and again by phone just prior to DAC in June. During the phone call, Rawat focused on CEDA’s activities at DAC in Austin. He told me the upcoming Sunday night panel, set to be moderated by SRC’s Bill Joyner on June 5th, was a new and very exciting addition to the DAC program.
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Tags: Accellera, CEDA, Council on Electronic Design Automation, DAC, DAC Young Faculty Workshop, DATE, Design Automation Conference, DVCon, ICCAD, IEEE
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Wednesday, June 15th, 2016
Presidents and CEOs share a common difficulty: the past. A past that’s sometimes of their own making. They come into office full of enthusiasm and an agenda for improvement and innovation, only to find that the past serves increasingly as an impediment for moving forward.
Of course, the difference between Presidents and CEOs is that the former get libraries built in their name to commemorate their contributions, whether or not they’re able to conquer a past legacy left to them by predecessors.
CEOs, on the other hand, don’t get libraries when their tenures end. They either get tons of criticism, or occasionally tons of praise – but no library. They do, however, often get millions of dollars in compensation and stock during their administrations, and usually a pretty golden handshake when they’re done. Something that goes a long way to easing the pain of criticisms they may endure during and after their years in power.
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Tags: 53rd DAC, Aart de Geus, Cadence, Chi-Foon Chan, Design Automation Conference, Ed Sperling, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Steve Jobs, Synopsys
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Thursday, May 26th, 2016
Ten years ago, Rich Weber and Jamsheed Agahi surveyed an industry they knew well – they each had 10+ years’ involvement in the technology – and found no one was providing hardware/software interface solutions. So in February 2006, they founded a company to “provide good solutions to the industry” and got busy coding. They had their software up and running by DAC, held that year in San Francisco, were featured in the July 2006 issue of EETimes, and were working with their first customers by the end of the year.
Those early successes were an indication of the credibility of Semifore Inc. and a reflection of the singular vision of founders who knew each other well; they had worked with together at various companies prior to 2006, Data General, Silicon Graphics, StratumOne and Cisco Systems. Starting Semifore together was the logical next step in their collaborations. Now ten years on, both founders are still with the company
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Tags: Accellera, CoStar Design Director Platform, Design Automation Conference, Heart of Technology, IP-XACT, Jamsheed Agahi, Rich Weber, Semifore Inc., SPIRIT Consortium, SystemRDL, UVM
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Thursday, May 19th, 2016
The spirit of Marie R. Pistilli will be writ large at the Design Automation Conference in Austin in June, because the woman who is receiving this year’s MRP Women in Engineering Achievement Award embodies everything that Marie admired in a technologist:
Intelligence. Courage. Articulate leadership. Powerful work ethic. Technical contribution. A track record of mentoring women in a field that has been incredibly resistant to people who are different.
Yep, Dr. Soha Hassoun, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University, has all the strengths of character that Marie admired, but there’s more: Prof. Hassoun is also well-spoken, funny, charming, and beautiful.
Just icing on the cake and not part of the reason Prof. Hassoun deserves the award, but all characteristics that Marie would have admired as well, and did admire – particularly as Hassoun is a permanent member of the DAC Family: She was General Chair of DAC in 2013, the conference being one of Marie’s deepest passions.
Indeed the greatest honor that could be brought to the memory of the remarkable Marie Pistilli is to select the equally remarkable Soha Hassoun as standard-bearer for outstanding achievement in EDA – woman or man – at the first DAC after Marie’s tragic passing last November.
Kudos to the committee for selecting Dr. Hassoun. Well done!
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Tags: Design Automation Conference, Dr. Soha Hassoun, ICCAD, Marie Pistilli, Marie R. Pistilli Women in Engineering Achievement Award, Tufts University, University of Washington
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Thursday, April 14th, 2016
The DAC family has lost another loved one. University of Pittsburgh ECE professor Steve Levitan passed away in early March and is going to be missed terribly in Austin in June.
I had a chance to interview Dr. Levitan in late 2006, as he was ramping up to serve as General Chair of the 44th DAC, and found him to be very sincere and down-to-earth. He was clearly one of those rare individuals who respected the balance between academia and industry, and how each sphere plays an equally critical role in pushing the envelope in electronic design automation. The text of that interview is available below.
Earlier this week, I received a note from Soha Hassoun, Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Tufts and General Chair of the 51st DAC in 2013. Professor Hassoun said that she and Penn State CSE Professor Mary Jane Irwin have written a very nice article memorializing Steve Levitan, set to be published in the May/June issue of IEEE Design and Test magazine.
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Tags: Design Automation Conference, Dr. Soha Hassoun, Dr. Steven Levitan, University of Pittsburgh
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