EDPS: Dolphins and FinFETs

The Electronic Design Process Symposium (EDPS) has been held in late April or early May for 23 years. For as long as I have attended, it has been held in a hotel on the beach just north of Monterey. If you are lucky, you may catch sight of dolphins from the conference room. You will see fins on the screen too, but those would be in FinFETs. This year the conference is on April 21 and 22, as usual in the Monterey Tides Hotel (formerly Monterey Beach Hotel) at 2600 Sand Dunes Drive (great address). Cadence is the gold sponsor and the general chair is Cadence's Aparna Dey.

The focuses (foci?) this year are on:

• FPGA prototyping for IoT
• Low-power design methodology
• Multi-die design and application
• Cyber security (the whole of the second day)

There are several keynotes:

• To open the conference, Serge Leef of Mentor Graphics will talk on the Convergence of Silicon, Sensors, Mobility, and Cloud as Driving Forces in System Design Evolution. Serge is the VP of New Ventures at Mentor and General Manager of the System-Level Engineering Division
• At dinner on the evening between the two days (I'm assuming in the Monterey Yacht Club as usual), Ken Caviasca of Intel, will talk on IoT Solutions: System Scaling During the Convergence of IT and IoT. Ken wins the prize for longest job title of the day, since officially he is Vice President of the Internet of Things Group and General Manager of Platform Engineering and Development
• To open the second day, Chris Eagle of the Naval Postgraduate School gives the keynote. The precise title is not yet announced because...well, due to cyber security, it's a secret. But I am sure the topic will be some aspect of cyber security.

Take a look at the full program for the conference.

The second day is billed as a cyber security workshop. One of the interesting things that there will be actual demonstrations of some of these attacks on chips that you normally only read about, such as differential power analysis. From the agenda:

Secure boot, trusted execution environments, and many other security mechanisms depend on the security of the underlying hardware. What if we can break the actual hardware? And what if that's easier than breaking the software? Side channel analysis (SCA) and fault injection (FI) are techniques to break various security mechanisms, allowing an attack to load arbitrary firmware code and discover secrets such as cryptographic keys and PINs from cryptographic hardware...Besides the necessary theory, we demonstrate these attacks real time, for instance, we break a symmetric key algorithm through real-time power analysis and skip a PIN verification.

Since Aparna, the General Chair, has her office approximately 20 paces from mine, I sat down with her to get some more color on the symposium. She told me that they had taken a lot of care to pick "hot topics": low power, IoT, advanced packaging, cyber security. These are technologies and markets that are driving changes in design methodology and the types of chips that get designed.

The cyber security workshop on the second day is somewhat of an experiment, instead of having normal sessions and panel sessions continue for another day. It is organized with the Monterey Naval Postgraduate Institute.

EDPS was always one of Gary Smith's special projects in which he was always heavily involved. I don't think I've ever been to EDPS when Gary was not there in his orange jacket. Last year must have been the first time he wasn't there, but I was traveling and so I didn't go myself.

Who should go? Anyone interested in design methodology, future processes and technologies. Obviously anyone interested in cyber security, which should be almost everyone, as it is one of the biggest issues facing chip design, IoT, mobile (ask Tim Cook), and more.

You can register for the conference now. Registration includes a flashdrive of the workshop notes, full buffet breakfast on both days, lunch both days, and the banquet dinner. If you are a non-IEEE member, I can get you a discount (the IEEE earlybird price is already very low). Just use the code "Paul4EDPS" (may be case sensitive) but it only works until the end of earlybird registration on March 31.