DAC News

The 49th DAC Pavilion Panels Program Features Interviews, Business Trends and Advanced Technology Topics

LOUISVILLE, Colo. –– April 23, 2012 –– The 49th Design Automation Conference (DAC), the premier conference devoted to design and design automation of electronic systems, will feature 15 Pavilion Panel sessions in the program lineup for DAC 2012. Complementing the more in-depth DAC technical conference program, the DAC Pavilion, sponsored by GLOBALFOUNDRIES, hosts an eclectic mix of panels, presentations and interviews in booth #310 on the exhibit floor. DAC 2012 will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, from June 3-7, 2012.

“DAC is the biggest opportunity each year for designers, EDA and Semiconductor IP developers and their management to interact together,” said Patrick Groeneveld, General Chair of DAC 2012. “The pavilion program features a compelling range of general interest topics from IC power and partitioning, to an electric car teardown and high-school students talking about how they use technology.”

Gary Smith kicks off the Pavilion program with his annual “What’s Hot at DAC” presentation on Monday, June 4th, from 9:15-10:15am. The rest of Monday’s pavilion panels are:

• “Low Power to the People,” a panel discussing low-power design techniques, challenges and solutions.
• “Is Life-Care the Next Killer App?” a panel looking at where electronics and EDA are going in health, energy efficiency, safety and productivity.
• “The Mechanics of Creativity,” sponsored by Women in Electronic Design, a panel looking at how we can be creative on demand and sharing stories of innovation.
• An interview with this year’s Marie R. Pistilli award winner Dr. Belle Wei.

On Tuesday, the panels are:

• “Hogan’s Heroes: Learning from Apple.” Visionary EDA veteran Jim Hogan leads a panel to look at what we all can learn about product development from Apple, now the world’s most valuable company.
• “Foundry, EDA and IP: Solve Time-to-Market Already!” a panel discussion on what semiconductor IP, EDA and foundry vendors are doing to further reduce the time to design a modern SoC.
• “Chevy Volt Teardown: Automotive Electronics.” Brian Fuller and a team of experts discuss what is “under the hood” of the Chevy Volt; especially its 310V lithium-ion battery and its control electronics.
• “Heritage Series: An Interview with Dr. Jim Solomon.”  Steve Ohr gets up-close and personal with Dr. Jim Solomon, the 1997 Kaufman award winner who has been working for decades on advancing analog design automation.
•  “Conquering New Frontiers in Analog Design – Plunging Below 28nm.” Analog no longer has the luxury of trailing a couple of process generations behind digital.  This panel discusses the challenges and solutions on the roadmap of advanced semiconductor technology nodes.

Wednesday’s pavilion panels are:

• “Town Hall: The Dark Side of Moore’s Law.” EDA Venture Capitalist Lucio Lanza  looks at how to get design costs back in line with Moore’s law so that EDA and semiconductor companies can also profit.
• “Divide and Conquer – Intelligent Partitioning.” There are many reasons to partition a huge design, but there are equally good reasons not to! This panel looks at all these issues.
• “Real World Heterogeneous Multicore.”  Experts share real world experiences of implementing heterogeneous multicores as well as techniques and tools to develop systems that take advantage of these architectures.
• “Teens Talk Tech” where, once again, high-school students tell us how they use the latest tech gadgets, and what they expect to be using in three to five years.
• “Hardware-Assisted Prototyping & Verification: Make vs. Buy?” Emulators are expensive, but building a custom FPGA prototype has its own set of challenges. This panel discusses the tradeoffs.

“The range of topics in the DAC Pavilion panels is especially broad this year,” said Charles Alpert, DAC 2012 Pavilion Panel Chair. “Attendees have the opportunity to learn in-depth about key areas of design today, and gain some insights into topics where they may lack specialized knowledge.”

A full-DAC panel schedule and links to panel abstracts and speaker information is available at www.dac.com.

About DAC
The Design Automation Conference (DAC) is recognized as the premier event for the design of electronic circuits and systems, and for electronic design automation (EDA) and silicon solutions. A diverse worldwide community representing more than 1,000 organizations attends each year, represented by system designers and architects, logic and circuit designers, validation engineers, CAD managers, senior managers and executives to researchers and academicians from leading universities. Close to 60 technical sessions selected by a committee of electronic design experts offer information on recent developments and trends, management practices and new products, methodologies and technologies. A highlight of DAC is its exhibition and suite area with approximately 200 of the leading and emerging EDA, silicon, intellectual property (IP) and design services providers. The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDA Consortium), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and is supported by ACM's Special Interest Group on Design.

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