As is now traditional, Gary Smith kicked off DAC proper (there were workshops earlier and some co-located conferences started days before). He started by dismissing the idea that it costs $170M to do an SoC design.In fact he looked at 3 different cases. Firstly, the completely unconstrained design. Well, no design is completely unconstrained but for the main part of the market (mobile of one form or another) the power budget is 5W. EDA has actually done a good job of solving power problems and... Read More
One of the other increasingly successful channels (besides Semiwiki of course) for EDA, IP and semiconductor companies to reach potential customers is John Cooley's DeepChip. Every year he puts a lot of effort into trying to find out who is exhibiting what at DAC and which stuff seems like it is new and maybe important, and he produces a long guide (a couple of dozen pages). He even lists by name the most appropriate contact person at each company for the product that he is talking about.... Read More
The big 50th Anniversary party for DAC is on Monday night at the home of Austin City Limits. However, you can do good while enjoying yourself and also get into "The Hot Zone", an exclusive area within the party in the penthouse Jack and Jim Gallery. All you have to do is to donate $50 or more to CASA.CASA speaks up for children who've been abused or neglected by empowering the community to volunteer as advocates for them in the court system. Contributions go directly to CASA to... Read More
I already wrote about Franklin Barbecue, by some rankings the best in the whole country. If you want to go there you must be there early. They start serving at 11am and run out of food around 1pm. Closed on Monday.
But there are other barbecue and similar places near the convention center. Since I'm not an Austin native (we'll be back in my comfort zone the next couple of years since I live in San Francisco) I gathered local knowledge.
IronWorks- walking distance around the corner from the... Read More
This year, as part of DAC's 50th celebrations, DAC has organized the DAC Global Forum (DAC-GF). DAC-GF celebrates contributions and plans of nations around the globe to the field of electronic design in past 50 years and in the future. The Global Forum is sponsored by ATIC, the parent company of Global Foundries, an investment vehicle of the Abu Dhabi government.Countries from around the world at different stages in development of their electronic industries will have exhibits. Countries... Read More
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
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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).
