For 19 years GSA (going back to the days when it was Fabless Semiconductor Association, FSA) has recognized public and private semiconductor companies. The awards are celebrated at a dinner. This year's dinner is on Thursday December 12th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The keynote speaker at the dinner is Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark NJ.
Nominations for the awards are now open.
Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award. The GSA’s most prestigious award recognizes individuals... Read More
This year for the first time the Thursday of DAC is tranining day. So that would be June 6th in Austin, of course. There are four tracks of training focused on SystemC, ARM Cortex and two on SystemVerilog, all areas of increasing use in SoC design, especially in mobile.
Each track of training is divided into two parts, one held from 9am to 12.30pm, and then a second part from 2pm to 5.30pm. All sessions are taught by a professional educator from Doulos (along with an engineer from ARM for the... Read More
Last night at Cadence was the next installment of what I have been calling Hogan University. Jim interviewed Joe Costello about how to tell a story as part of the EDAC emerging companies series of events. The main focus was how to tell a story as a small EDA company communicating with investors, although there are obviously other forms of communication. I'm assuming that if you are reading the DAC blog that you know that Joe Costello was CEO of Cadence for many years, taking it from its... Read More
This year DAC has keynotes by CEOs of two Austin-based companies Freescale Semiconductor and National Instrument. Two more keynotes (one split into two) are focused on mobile, which has become the major driver of semiconductor today. A fifth keynote, including presentation of the best paper award for DAC 2013, is by Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, who should need no introduction to readers of SemiWiki. The five keynotes are: Monday June 3rd at 10.15: Greg Lowe of Freescale... Read More
The core of the technical program consists of 158 peer-reviewed papers organized in 34 technical paper sessions, 20 sessions focused on EDA, 10 on embedded systems and 4 specific to system-level design. The total balance is 64% EDA papers and 34% embedded systems and system level papers. Eight papers were selected as best papers candidates.
Papers were selected from 747 submissions, with an acceptance rate of 21%. Among them two perspective papers were selected, focusing on mapping on many/... Read More
The last session of the day for Linley Mobile was about processors to go into smartphones. One surprise was that there is a core that nobody seems to have heard of since it is only really used in Taiwan up until now, and it is used in several Mediatek chips.
The most "glamorous" processor in a smartphone is the one in the application processor chip (or the one exposed to the apps in an integrated AP+BB chip). However there may be as many as 15 more processors in a smartphone inside things like... Read More
Of course DAC is in June. But this coming week is full of other conferences in EDA, semiconductor and neighboring spaces.
EDPS in Monterey is Thursday and Friday. The website with full details, the programme, registration etc is here.
On Wednesday and Thursday it is the Linley Mobile Microprocessor Conference in the Hyatt in Santa Clara. Full details are here.
And on Thursday at the Computer History Museum it is the GSA Technology Silicon Summit. Full details are here.
Cadence has brought a suit against Berkeley Design Automation for, as far as I can see, integrating their AFS circuit simulator with the Virtuoso Analog Design Environment (ADE) without using the (licensed) Oasis product. Since BDA is (actually was) a member of the Cadence Connections program, they have to abide by the contract which only allows them to create interfaces that their Connections legal contract allows. In particular "Member is not licensed to develop any interface to or... Read More
UBM's EETimes and EDN today announced Kathryn Kranen as the lifetime achievement award winner for this years ACE awards program. Kathryn, of course, is the CEO of Jasper (and is also currently the chairman of EDAC). Past winners exemplify the prestige and significance of the award. Since 2005 the award was given to Gordon Moore, then the Chairman emeritus of Intel, Wilf Corrigan, the Chairman of the board of LSI, Chung-Mou Chang the Founding Chairman of TSMC and Pasquale Pistorio the... Read More
This year's recipient of the Kaufman Award is Dr Chenming Hu. I can't think of a more deserving recipient. He is the father of the FinFET transistor which is clearly the most revolutionary thing to come along in semiconductor for a long time. Of course he wasn't working alone but he was the leader of the team at UC Berkeley that developed the key structures that keep power under control and so allow us to continue to scale process nodes. In the past, the Kaufman Award recipient has been... Read More
The program for EDPS in Monterey this April 18th and 19th is now available.
The first day has a keynote by Ivo Bolsens, the CTO of Xilinx, on The All Programmable SoC - At the Heart of Next Generation Embedded System. That is followed by 3 sessions on ESL & Platform, Design Collaboration, and 3D-IC.
The second day has a keynote by Daniel Nenni on The FinFET Value Proposition. This is followed by two sessions, also on FinFET. FinFET Design Challenges, and FinFET Design Enablement Challenges... Read More
The entire program for DAC is now live here. Registration is now open here. It is just a little over two months to go. I'll blog later about some of the special sessions and tracks at this years DAC, some because it is looking back over the last 50 years and some because it is in Austin for the first time. But go and sign up (exhibitor registration is also open).
Somebody pointed out this fascinating teardown (sorry, can't remember who it was. Oops). It is a teardown of a 1986 Psion II organiser, a 1996 Palm Pilot 5000 (back when they were still US robotics and before Pilot pens made them drop the Pilot name) and then an HP iPaq 5550. It is interesting to watch the level of integration increase and the density of the circuit boards really go down as IC packaging technology changes (these are all QFP chips I think). It is amazing how much stuff we... Read More
Mike Demler has an interesting article using the 50th DAC (or, as he pedantically points out, the 49th anniversary of the first DAC) as a reason to look back at what are the most significant development in the history of EDA. GDS, Spice, HDL. Go read the whole article to find out his other choices.
I just recently blogged about the CEO panel which had Simon Segars of ARM on it. He was sort of an impostor since he wasn't actually the CEO of ARM. But that is all about to change. ARM announced yesterday that Warren East, the CEO, would be retiring at the end of June. The new CEO will be Simon, currently President of ARM and the de facto #2 guy. Currently Simon is based in the US and I don't know if he plans to return to Britain or not. But he will live what will inevitably be a lifestyle... Read More
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DAC is the premier conference devoted to the design and automation of electronic systems (EDA), embedded systems and software (ESS), and intellectual property (IP).
DAC 2019 will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Get details about travel, hotels, and area attractions in one convenient spot.
