Student Activities at DAC
DAC is recognized as the global event for chips to systems. DAC focuses on the latest methodologies and technology advancements in electronic design. The 62nd DAC will continue to provide several opportunities for students and early career professionals to make the connections they need to jumpstart their career in electronic design and automation.
Ph.D Forum at DAC
The Ph.D. Forum at the DAC is a poster session hosted by ACM SIGDA and IEEE CEDA for Ph.D. students to present and discuss their dissertation research with people in the EDA community. It has become one of the premier forums for Ph.D. students in design automation to get feedback on their research and for industry to see academic work in progress: hundreds of people attended the last forums. Participation in the forum is competitive with acceptance rate of around 30%. Limited funds will be available for travel assistance, based on financial needs. The forum is open to all members of the design automation community and is free-of-charge. It is co-located with DAC to attract the large DAC audience, but DAC registration is not required in order to attend this event.
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University Demonstration at DAC
SIGDA University Demonstration (UD, previously University Booth) is a great opportunity for university researchers to showcase their results and to interact with participants at DAC. Presenters and attendees at DAC are especially encouraged to participate, but participation is open to all members of the university community. The demonstrations include new EDA tools, EDA tool applications, design projects, and instructional materials.
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DAC Young Fellows Program
Attention all students! Are you ready to take your future career to the next level? Then don't miss the exciting opportunity to attend the 62nd DAC in historic San Francisco as a DAC Young Fellow.
As a Young Fellow, you'll have the chance to learn from experts in the industry, network with like-minded individuals, and participate in hands-on labs, career coaching, summer school, and fun contests. Plus, we'll cover your conference registration fee and offer grants of up to $1,200 to help with travel expenses. DAC funds the program with support from Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys, and Siemens EDA.
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Hack@DAC
HACK@DAC is a hardware security challenge contest, co-located with DAC, for finding and exploiting security-critical vulnerabilities in hardware and firmware. In this competition, participants compete to identify the security vulnerabilities, implement the related exploits, propose mitigation techniques or patches, and report them. The participants are encouraged to use any tools and techniques with a focus on theory, tooling, and automation.
The contest mimics real-world scenarios where security engineers have to find vulnerabilities in the given design. The vulnerabilities are diverse and range from data corruption to leaking sensitive information leading to compromise of the entire computing platform. The open-source SoC riddled with security vulnerabilities has been co-developed by Intel, the Technical University of Darmstadt, and Texas A&M University. HACK@DAC has been successfully running since 2018 with several hundred contestants from academia and industry.
Winners of the competition will be honored at the DAC award ceremony next June at Moscone West Center, San Francisco, CA.
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System Design Contest
The On-Device Multi-modal Generative AI for Science Contest at DAC 2025 is a challenging, multi-month research and development competition focused on real-world scientific problems that require deploying multi-modal generative AI algorithms on low-end edge devices. It is open to teams from around the world. Winning teams will be invited to attend DAC 2025 to receive their awards.
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