CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
2 April 2012
Events News
Something for Everyone as 49th Design Automation Conference Opens Advance Registration
The 49th Design Automation Conference (DAC) opened advance registration today. The program this year highlights the advancements and emerging trends in the design of electronic circuits and systems and runs the gamut from wild and crazy ideas (WACI) to advanced peer-reviewed technical papers. Attendees can build their own schedules by choosing from quality technical papers, panels, special sessions, WACIs, WIPs (works in progress), full day tutorials, an Embedded Systems & Software (ESS) executive day, Management Day, and User Track presentations. Every EDA professional, whether an IC designer, manager, software developer or R&D researcher, will find the very latest developments in the field. DAC 2012 will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, from June 3-7, 2012.
Attendees will have a hard time choosing from all the options available at DAC each day. A brief outline follows, but the Technical Program Committee is whetting people’s appetites with technical presentations such as “Yin and Yang of Memories: The power-performance trade-off” and “Design Automation for Things Wet, Small and Spooky.”
Peer-reviewed Papers:
The core of the technical program consists of 163 peer-reviewed papers with 35% of the content on ESS and 65% on electronic design automation (EDA). Papers were selected from 742 submissions, the highest number of submissions to the conference in the past 5 years, and an increase of 7% from 2011. These papers cover a broad set of topics ranging from system-level design, low power, physical design and manufacturing, embedded systems and software, logic and high-level synthesis, simulation, verification, test and emerging technologies. Popular submission themes included:
1. Power analysis and low power
2. Physical Design and design for manufacturability
3. Architectures and memory design for embedded systems
4. ESS design methodologies
5. Emerging technologies
Special Sessions:
Ten special sessions will deal with a wide variety of themes -- from physical design to embedded software -- including progress in design closure, power at different levels of abstraction, heterogeneous platforms, probabilistic embedded computing, self-awareand adaptive technologies and neuromorphic computing. This year special sessions also will focus on how EDA can be applied to applications and problems not usually considered EDA, such as electronic counterfeit, wireless sensor networks design, and medical devices designs.
User Track:
The User Track program -- sponsored by Apache Design, Inc., a subsidiary of ANSYS, Inc. -- includes the keynote, eight paper sessions, two poster sessions, and the design panel session. This year, the reviewing committee (35 industry experts representing user communities at 24 different companies) received 142 submissions, with authors from 90 institutions. The topics chosen span embedded software to lithography and highlight challenges, solutions and methodologies covering verification, timing analysis, ASIC and FPGA design flows, IP block integration, test and debug.
Users of EDA and embedded systems tools and flows will provide information to designers and practitioners: design tool users, hardware or software designers, application engineers, consultants, and flow or methodology developers. To make it easier to attend as many of these as possible, the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions will take place adjacent to the exhibit floor.
Panels:
A pervasive theme that panels address at DAC 2012 is the question: Have we reached a tipping point for a variety of technologies? High-level synthesis, system models, 3D chips, FPGA expansion, parallel EDA, and the cloud are technologies that have been discussed and researched for some time now; this year we separate the reality from the anticipation. Many DAC 2012 panels discuss whether each of these technologies is about to tip, taking off to become mainstream and thereby changing the face of the EDA industry. Other panels address vexing issues like the impact of reliability, low-power design and automation, and the role of software versus hardware.
Tutorials:
As in the past, the goal of the DAC tutorials is to provide practical, useable, and up-to-date knowledge that attendees can immediately apply in their jobs or studies. This year’s program includes six tutorials that include three system level topics: virtual platforms, system level power modeling, and high level synthesis; and three design topics addressing 20nm design challenges, implications of 3DIC and wide I/O on design, and analog / mixed-signal at advance process nodes.
Exhibit Floor:
With over 200 exhibitors, including 21 first time exhibitors, this year’s exhibit floor offers exciting technologies and vendors to DAC attendees. New this year is the ARM Connected Community® Pavilion, where attendees can visit ARM® technology-based demos from ARM partners. The exhibits are open Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with the User Track presentations on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Embedded Systems & Software (ESS) Executive Day 2012 (Wednesday, June 6):
The ESS Executive Day sessions are dedicated to bringing industry stakeholders together in one room to foster discussion on all aspects of the embedded development ecosystem and on where system design is headed. The day-long track is comprised of presentations from leading industry executives representing the embedded development ecosystem. IC design engineers, embedded systems designers, embedded software and hardware IP providers, IP integrators, FPGA designers, investors, foundry reps, and the media will be on hand in this new forum to hear from market leaders and to network with each other.
Presenters will focus on optimization of embedded and application domain-specific operating systems, system architecture for future embedded products, application-specific architectures based on embedded processors and technical/business decision making by program developers. They will cover the state-of-the-art solutions for embedded software and systems and complex chips as well as the need for tight collaboration between diverse players in this ecosystem.
Management Day 2012 (Tuesday, June 5):
The rubber meets the road at the intersection of low power systems-on-chip (SoC) design and the adoption of emerging technologies. Management Day provides engineering and business managers with essential information to make the right decisions at the intersection of business and technology, optimizing for volume production, low power, and the shrinking sizes that necessitate accurate trade-off analysis to drive technical/business decision-making. The Management Day sessions were designed to create lively dialog and to provide decision criteria to guide managers towards optimum choices from a pool of alternative options for flows, methodologies and suppliers.
Management Day at DAC 2012 will feature presentations by managers from independent device manufacturers (IDMs), fab-light ASIC providers, foundries, and fabless companies. Senior managers of today’s most complex nanometer SoCs will discuss the latest emerging solutions, along with their economic impact. A third panel session will involve the audience in an open brainstorming discussion and will complement the presentation sessions.
Advance registration ends on May 7, 2012. For all registration details, deadlines, and program highlights see http://www.dac.com
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