DAC 2012 - San Francisco, CA

The Design Automation Conference (DAC) is the premier event for the design of electronic circuits and systems, and for EDA and silicon solutions.

Now in its 49th year, DAC features a wide array of technical presentations, as well as the leading electronics design suppliers in a colorful, well-attended trade show that, literally, attracts stakeholders from around the world.

Top Ten Reasons to Attend the 49th DAC

1. Keynotes by industry leaders/visionaries
2. 175+ vendors on the Exhibition Floor
3. Technical Program sessions (research, panels, special sessions)
4. User Track Sessions for users by users
5. Interactive poster sessions for networking/discussion/learning
6. Management Day
7. ESS Executive Day
8. Colocated Conferences and Workshops
9. Awards for outstanding contributions for both professionals and students in EDA
10. Free networking cocktail receptions each night

KEYNOTES

Scaling for 2020 Solutions
Speaker: Mike Muller - ARM, Inc., Cambridge, United Kingdom

Summary: Comparing the original ARM design of 1985 to those of today’s latest microprocessors, Mike will look at how far has design come and what EDA has contributed to enabling these advances in systems, hardware, operating systems, and applications and how business models have evolved over 25 years. He will then speculate on the needs for scaling designs into solutions for 2020 from tiny embedded sensors through to cloud based servers which together enable the internet of things. He will look at what are the major challenges that need to be addressed to design and manufacture these systems and proposes some solutions.

Mike Muller was one of the founders of ARM. Before joining the company, he was responsible for hardware strategy and the development of portable products at Acorn Computers and was part of the original ARM design team. He was previously at Orbis Computers who developed network computers. At ARM he was VP, Marketing from 1992 to 1996 and EVP, Business Development until October 2000 when he was appointed Chief Technology Officer. In October 2001, he was appointed to the board of ARM Holdings plc.

Designing High Performance Systems-on-Chip
Speakers: Joshua Friedrich - IBM Server and Technology Group, Austin, TX
Brad Heaney - Intel Corp., Folsom, CA

Summary: Experience state-of-the art design through the eyes of two experts that help shape these advanced chips!

In this unique dual-keynote, the design process at two leading companies will be discussed.The speakers will cover key challenges, engineering decisions and design methodologies to achieve top performance and turn-around time. The presentations describe where EDA meets practice under the most advanced nodes, so will be of key interest to both designers and EDA professionals alike.

POWERTM Processor Design and Methodology Directions: Joshua Friedrich Processor designs and the EDA tools that support them stand at a key inflection point. The era of Dennard scaling and exponential single thread performance growth is a distant memory. Multi-thread performance continues to grow. However, the gain from simply adding more cores to a die by stepping to the next process node is diminishing due to technology challenges, application bottlenecks, and power/packaging constraints. To continue to deliver the cost-performance gains that drive our industry, designers will need to bring significant innovation to bear by integrating heterogeneous system components and accelerating key portions of the software stack in hardware. This transformation from technology-driven design to innovation-driven design defines new priorities for EDA development compared to prior eras. While timing optimization, power reduction, and support for modular designs remain necessary, differentiation will be achieved by enabling designer productivity through technology simplification, design abstraction, and robust support for heterogeneous IP.

Joshua Friedrich is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Senior Manager of POWERTM Technology Development in IBM’s Server and Technology Group. In his role, Josh leads the physical design, technology direction, and methodology of IBM’s future POWERTM processors. Josh has been part of the POWER development team since POWER4TM, and on past POWERTM designs, Josh has led multiple design disciplines including power estimation and reduction, hardware characterization, memory subsystem circuit development, and core execution units. Before joining IBM, Josh received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

My First Design Automation Conference - 1982
Speaker: C.L. Liu - National Tsing Hua Univ., Hinschu, Taiwan

Summary: It was June 1982 that I had my first technical paper in the EDA area presented at the 19th Design Automation Conference. It was exactly 20 years after I completed my doctoral study and exactly 30 years ago from today. I would like to share with the audience how my prior educational experience prepared me to enter the EDA field and how my EDA experience prepared me for the other aspects of my professional life.

C. L. Liu received his B. Sc. degree (1956) from the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, and his S. M. (1960) and Sc. D. (1962) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He also served as the President of the National Tsing Hua University from 1998 to 2002.

He is currently the William Mong Honorary Chair Professor of Computer Science at the National Tsing Hua University, an industrial consultant, and the host of a weekly radio show (since 2005). He has published over 180 technical papers, eight technical textbooks and research monographs in the area of EDA, computer –aided instruction, real-time systems, combinatorial optimization, and discrete mathematics, and seven essay collections in the area of science and humanities.