It's CDNLive! Well, not today, Tuesday and Wednesday, April 2nd and 3rd at the Santa Clara Convention Center. So I have eight things you can do to get the most out of CDNLive and go home with a new addition to your wardrobe. And, if you are lucky, a MacBook Air. Oh, and while you're there for all the swag, we have some great presentations to attend and a great expo. Not to mention a free lunch. So here goes...

1. CDNLive App

The first thing you should do is download the CDNLive App. This has the complete agenda, so you can plan your day. If we need to communicate any last-minute changes, then this will be done via the App. You don't have to wait until CDNLive starts to do this, you can download it right now. If you attended CDNLive last year and didn't assiduously clean up the Apps on your phone, you may have it already. You'll just need to log in again.

But wait, there's more. And not a set of steak knives, a set of MacBooks. Well, two of them. There is a Leaderboard game that you play by submitting comments and photos. At the end of each day, there will be a drawing among people at the top of the board for a MacBook.

2. Cadence Keynote by Lip-Bu Tan

The keynotes start at 10:30am on Tuesday. There are technical track sessions before that, but to make sure nobody misses the keynotes, they end the morning. Yes, we live here, we know what Silicon Valley traffic is like.

Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence's CEO, will present an overview of Cadence and the semiconductor environment in which we all live, and his perspective on important industry trends.

3. Keynote by Andy Bechtolsheim

Andy Bechtolsheim will give the invited keynote. He was famous for being one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, where he was the chief hardware designer. Later, he founded Granite Networks and stayed on at Cisco after the acquisition as GM of the Gigabit Systems Division.

He was also famous for being the first investor in Google, giving them a check for $100,000 before they even had a company to invest in. Unfortunately, because it's such a good story, it's not true that they named the company Google because that's what Andy wrote on the check, and so that was the only way they could cash it.

More recently, he founded Arista Networks where he is Chairman and Chief Development Officer. For more about them, see my post about his keynote at the Linley Microprocessor Conference a couple of years ago Andy Bechtolsheim Keynote on the Future of Networking.

4. Keynote by Anirudh Devgan...plus a Product Announcement

Anirudh Devgan, President of Cadence, will present. He'll also be announcing a new product, but you'll just have to be there. Or read Breakfast Bytes that day since I'll be writing about it.

5. Designer Expo

Again this year, the Expo will be open at lunch and the evening reception on Tuesday, and also at lunch on Wednesday. So that would be Tuesday from 12:00pm-1:30pm, and then again from 5:00pm-6:30pm. On Wednesday, it is 12:00pm-1:30pm.

Of course, Cadence will be there in force, but so will a wide selection of our partners, including Arm, TSMC, ClioSoft, Mathworks, and more.

6. A Year of Breakfasts

I'll be in the expo on the Cadence booth giving away my new book A Year of Breakfasts 2018. This contains 25 posts from Breakfast Bytes last year, grouped into the top topics last year. I picked security, automotive, artificial intelligence, 5nm and EUV, semiconductor in China, and silicon photonics. If you let me scan your badge, you'll be signed up for Sunday Brunch (if you aren't already), the weekly email you get first thing on Mondays when you get to the office,

7. A Dozen Tracks Over 2 Days

The heart of CDNLive are the technical tracks. This year there are well over 100 presentations, with nearly 90% from Cadence's customers.

For the first time, we have an automotive track, running both days. There is also a cloud track on Wednesday, including presentations from the biggest cloud vendors: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google. Once again there is an academic track too.

Whatever area of design you work in, there are sessions for you:

• PCB Design
• SI/PI and IC Packaging
• Mixed Signal design
• SoC/System Verification
• IP/Block Verification
• Signoff
• IP & Automotive
• Front-end Design
• Digital Implementation / Advanced Node
• Custom / Advanced Node
• Cloud-Based Design
• Academic

8. Cold Feet...We Have the Answer

You've got cold feet about whether to come to CDNLive or not? We can solve that problem too! Treat your feet, not just your brain, to the CDNLive experience too. Just visit enough of the partners in the expo and get your card stamped.

If you fill in your survey (which you do on the CDNLive App...you did download the CDNLive App didn't you?), then you can take home a luggage wrap so you don't accidentally end up with someone else's clothes.

Details

Details of the whole conference are on the CDNLive Silicon Valley webpage.

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