Submission Guidelines

DAC is gathering new technical material (whitepapers, technical articles, how-to articles) and opinion pieces from the EDA and designer communities, to be published on DAC.com year-round.

Audience and scope:

1. Audience:  EDA, IC and Embedded design R&D professionals and academics.  
2. Scope: “Hot”, “critical” or otherwise timely topics – e.g., system-level design, embedded software, analog synthesis, variability mitigation, low-power methodology, front-end verification best practices, IP integration issues, business outlook and strategy, etc.  
3. Interest:  Articles should be of general interest (not overly narrow).
4. Scope and interest are judgment calls made jointly by editor and author – see Process

Article types:

1. Technical reviews (“10,000-foot level”) – e.g., “state of play”, “futures of / vision for…”
2. Technical deep-dives (“latest and greatest, bleeding edge of technology”)
3. EDA industry whitepapers
   a.    Typically, a design problem and corresponding tool/methodology solution(s)
   b.    Whitepapers must be technical, and not “marketing”
   i.    This is a judgment call made jointly by editor and author – see Process
   c.    Whitepapers must be timely and not previously published
   i.    If a whitepaper has been previously published, it must be expanded and
   updated for publication on DAC.com
   ii.    Whitepapers more than two years old will require substantial updating if
   they are to be published on DAC.com
4. How-to’s (“best practices from the trenches”) – know-how that practitioners can use in their jobs after reading
5. Opinion pieces and perspectives – shorter, less fact-driven, more value judgements
6. User experiences
7. Word counts

a.   Technical reviews, deep-dives, whitepapers, how-to’s:  1500+ words, with as
many figures, tables, references as desired
b.   Opinion pieces and perspectives:  700-800  words

Process:

1. Contact Paul McLellan or Michelle Clancy with your article proposal
2. Send Paul an outline (for new articles) or any previous version (for whitepapers)
3. Agree on a final article scope and publication date
4. Budget 2 weeks for the 1-2 editor-author iterations that are likely after submission of a first draft
5. Submit materials for publication as MS Office (.doc) files or PDF by overwriting the DAC Article Template, which may be downloaded here.

Other:

1. Copyright will be retained by authors (and, as appropriate, their employers).
   a.    Authors must execute this release giving permission to publish on DAC.com
2. Editorial calendar
   a.    Articles will be published on a rolling basis year-round.