DAC: One Month and Counting

It is May already and just a month until DAC. I am sure that you already know that DAC is June 5-9^th in Austin. The DAC chair this year is Chuck Alpert, who works here at Cadence. He joined the company a couple of years ago after spending most of his career developing physical design tools for IBM research following an undergraduate degree at Stanford and a PhD from UCLA. I called him up last week to find out what is happening at DAC this year.

One thing that is new this year is that since Austin is a center for technology, art, and music (SXSW anyone?), DAC will have its own art show about silicon technology. People were invited to submit pictures of chips, pictures of algorithms, or pretty much anything that has a tenuous connection to semiconductor design. There were about 85 pieces submitted, and you will be able to see them in Austin.

Another change is that there is a lot more happening on Thursday, training day. There is still the Doulos training as in previous years but, new this year, is C++ training taught by engineers from NVIDIA, AMD and RackSpace. There is also executive training taught by the executive education team from University of Texas at Austin.

The keynotes are always a high spot of DAC for me, and this year they look especially compelling:

• On Monday morning, Lars Reger of NXP on Revolution Ahead—What It Takes to Enable Securely Connected, Self-Driving Cars. He is CTO of the automotive division at NXP in Hamburg. NXP is what is called a tier-1 supplier in the jargon of the automotive industry, supplying electronics to the companies that actually build cars, who are referred to as OEMs.
• On Tuesday morning, before the keynote, there is a visionary talk from Lou Sheffer titled Learning from Life: Biologically Inspired Electronic Design. If you work at Cadence that name might seem familiar since Lou was a Cadence fellow in physical design for many years, but now works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We can find out how much he has hung up his standard cells for blood cells.
• Lou is followed by Sameer Halepete of NVIDIA talking about Driving the Next Decade of Innovations in Visual and Accelerated Computing. He won’t just talk about the obvious stuff like gaming, but also deep learning and autonomous driving.
• Wednesday morning it is Mark Papermaster of AMD on The Challenge to Develop Truly Great Products. Maybe he should have said “insanely” great since he is considered to be the guy at Apple on iPhone 4 before he moved to AMD.
• Thursday morning has Peter Stone of UT Austin on Learning and Multiagent Reasoning for Autonomous Robots. For robots to become useful outside of the industrial environment where they are largely found today, we are in need of multidisciplinary research advances in many areas such as computer vision, tactile sensing, compliant motion, manipulation, locomotion, high-level decision-making, and many others that he will discuss.

On the exhibit floor there is the World of IoT, which is the center of three areas: the IP pavilion, the Makers’ Market, and the Embedded Pavilion area. It is also the center of the exhibit hall. Plus, if you are parking a car in the convention center garage, this is the place to go to get your parking validated. But the place you really need to visit is booth #107, the Cadence booth, in the lower left corner in the above map.

Let me put in a plug for the exhibit floor pavilion. It has a full schedule of very varied presentations, panel sessions, and more:

• The big 3 CEOs unscripted (not at the same time): Lip-Bu, Aart, and Wally
• Daily teardowns of a hoverboard, a drone, and an iPhone
• Austin angle talks with Bill Curtis of ARM, Julie Shannon of GirlStart, and Scott Hanson of Ambiq Micro
• Lucio Lanza, Jan Vardarman, Jim Turley, Jim Hogan, and more

Once again there is an I Love DAC program that lets you see much of the show for free. This year it is sponsored by AtopTech, ClioSoft and OneSpin. Register by May 18^th here.

But wait, there’s more. As always there is a whole conference, receptions in the evenings, tutorials. Plus food trucks and Keep Austin Nerdy T-shirts.

The DAC website, where you can find full details on everything, including links for registration, is at dac.com as always.

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