DAC Preview

The annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) is coming up December 5th to 9th, next week. It is in-person in San Francisco's Moscone Center West. It will be available virtually from December 13th until January 1st. To attend in person, you must be fully vaccinated. If you are US-based, you need to upload a copy of your vaccination card. If you are based overseas, you will need to show it to gain entry. Also, SEMICON West is going on at the same time, as is the RISC-V Symposium.

So why should you attend? Let me pull out a few highlights. You can also see the entire program in an interactive form that allows you to select by day, by topic, and so on.

If you want to find out what Cadence is doing at DAC, it is at the end of this post.

Sunday Reception

Charles Shi, Vice President and Research Analyst, Semiconductors & Semiconductor Equipment, Needham & Company opens up the proceedings on Sunday evening in room 3001 at 5-6pm. His presentation is titled EDA Growth Accelerates as Moore’s Law Slows, As it happens, I've recently seen a version of this presentation at a SEMI breakfast meeting—he has a lot of good data so definitely worth seeing.

Then, at 6pm, it is the DAC Welcome Reception.

Keynotes

There are four keynotes (left to right on the images above). These all take place in room 3008, which I think is the big theatre on the top floor.

• Jeff Dean, SVP Google Research and Google Health. Monday at 8.45am. The Potential of Machine Learning for Hardware Design. Jeff is one of the authors of the famous Nature paper A graph placement methodology for fast chip design.
• Bill Dally, Chief Scientist NVIDIA. Tuesday at 8.45am. GPUs, Machine Learning, and EDA.
• Joe Costello, Executive Chairman at Arrikto, Metrics, and Kwikbit. Wednesday at 8.45am. When the Winds of Change Blow. Some People Build Walls and Others Build Windmills. Of course, Joe is most famous in the EDA world for his long tenure as the CEO of Cadence. Also, he gave one of the best DAC keynotes I can remember in 2006, most famously lying on the conference stage pretending to be a fish.
• Kurt Keutzer, Professor of the Graduate School in EECS at the University of California Berkeley. Thursday at 8.45am. AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning: Whare Are the Real Opportunities for the EDA Industry. Before returning to academia, Kurt was the longtime CTO of Synopsys.

Sky Talks

There are three Sky Talks, which all take place in the pavilion on the exhibit floor.

• William Chappell, CTO Azure Global / VP of Mission Systems, Microsoft. Monday 1pm. Cloud and AI Technologies for Faster, Secure, Semiconductor Supply Chains.
• Kailash Gopalakrishnan, IBM Fellow and Senior Manager, Accelerator Architecture and Machine Learning. Tuesday 1pm. Accelerator Architectures and Machine Learning.
• Sam Naffziger, AMD Senior Vice President, Corporate Fellow, and Product Technology Architect. Wednesday at 1pm. Cross-Disciplinary Innovations Required for the Future of Computing.

Tech Talks

There are four Tech Talks, which also all take place in the DAC Pavilion.

• Serge Leef, DARPA Program Manager, Microsystems Technology Office. Monday 11.30am. Reimagining Digital Simulation.
• Neeraj Kaul, Vice President of Engineering, Digital Design Group. Synopsys. Monday 3pm. Delivering System Innovation to Power in the ERA of SysMoore.
• Michael Jackson, Corporate VP R&D, Cadence. Tuesday 11.30am. Charting the Path to 3nm and More than Moore.
• Steve Roddy, VP Machine Learning Group, Arm. Wednesday at 11.30am. The AI Hype Cycle is Over. Now What?

Students

There are educational activities at DAC (beyond the technical sessions):

• Young Fellows Program
• PhD Forum and University Demo
• DAC System Design Contest
• HACK@DAC

All the details are on the Educational Activities page.

Cadence at DAC

Cadence's booth is 1511 on the first-floor exhibit level.

Full details of Cadence's activities at DAC are on our DAC page.

Mahesh Turaga is presenting in the Cloud Pavilion on Monday at 10.30am: How Cadence Cloud is Empowering Digital Transformation for Electronic Design.

Michael Jackson is giving one of the tech talks (see above).

Frank Schirrmeister is leading a panel in the DAC Pavilion on Tuesday at 2pm. How System Companies are Re-shaping requirements for EDA. The panelists are:

• Chris Bergey, Arm
• Rebecca Lipon Weekly, Intel
• Amir Salek, Google
• Alex Starr, AMD
• Drew Wingard, Facebook

Patrick Bernard and Anton Kryukov will present on Thursday at 10.30am in room 3001 Accelerating EDA Algorithms with GPUs and Machine Learning.

Alessandra Nardi will present on Wednesday at 10.30am in room 3016 Research Manuscript: Exploit Your Modules for Complete Verification.

Chirayu Amin is presenting a virtual session Aging-Aware Static Timing Analysis.

There are also half a dozen poster sessions at the networking receptions at 5pm Monday through Wednesday.

Books

This year's book, A Year of Breakfasts 2021, will be available on our booth while supplies last. Come by and get a free copy.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.

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