Preview of Electronic Design Process Symposium 2018

It is nearly EDPS time again when the dolphin logo comes out, somewhat incongruously now that EDPS is held in Milpitas, not Monterey. EDPS is the Electronic Design Process Symposium. It is a relatively small conference, but it always seems to be covering the most important topics each year.

The conference is September 13th and 14th at the SEMI headquarters in Milpitas. See the end of this post for full details and how to register.

Keynotes

Chris Rowen

The opening keynote is by Chris Rowen, emeritus CTO of the Cadence IP group, and now the CEO of BabbleLabs, which you might guess from the name has something to do with speech and speech recognition. His keynote is titled Deep Learning Revolution—From Theory for Impact.

After many years of academic obscurity, deep learning has suddenly become one of the most important and transformative innovations in computing today. Spectacular successes in computer vision, speech and other pattern recognition tasks are capturing the attention of algorithm designers software developers and system architects across many applications. This talk outlines the key ideas of deep learning, explores the systematic improvements in accuracy in perception and recognition tasks, and looks at the rapid changes in underlying computer architectures, in application development methods, and in human-machine interfaces. 

Andrew Kahng

Andrew gets the soporific keynote right after lunch on the first day. He is Professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. His talk is titled Driving, Driven, Along for the Ride: Evolution of EDA, Manufacturing, and Design.

The relationships among EDA, Manufacturing and Design have evolved in many ways, as a consequence of various macro trends, over the past decades. The transition from IDM to fabless-foundry. The challenges of classic Moore's-Law density and cost scaling. The inexorable growth of variability, margins and design/signoff complexity. The visions of DFM (and MAD, DAM) modulating into DTCO -- amidst severe industry consolidation. The uncertain future of beyond-Moore / beyond-CMOS. Despite so many compelling forces, the three technology communities -- EDA, Manufacturing (and Test) and Design remain remarkably separated, with relatively arms-length interactions. This talk will try to explore some reasons behind this, and how some of the relationships and roles (driving, driven, along for the ride) might change in the future.

Jim Hogan and Amit Gupta

The dinner keynote is not really a keynote. The ESD Alliance is mounting the next of their "crossing the chasm" evenings with Jim Hogan. This time he will interview Amit Gupta on his recipe for success (he has two successful EDA exits, ADA and Solido). It so happens, I interviewed Amit on just this topic just before I joined Cadence, and so I'll have more details on that tomorrow.

Simon Johnson

Simon is a senior principal engineer at Intel. He kicks off the second day of the symposium with a keynote that is titled Hardware-Based Security. 

Sessions

Thursday

Innovative Design: Techniques. Despite the innocuous session title, this appears to be largely about machine learning in EDA, with Patrick Groenveld of Cadence/Stanford, Joonyoung Kim of NXL, Rohit Sherma of Fairpath, and Jai Kumar of Intel.

Smart Manufacturing: Talks are scheduled by Don Draper (no, not the Mad Men one), Chris Bailey of University of Greenwich (London), Tom Salmon of SEMI, Wilfred Bain of NextFlex, Matt Knowles of Mentor, and Dave Armstrong of Advantest.

System Reliability for ADAS, 5G, AI and Photonics: with Di Liang of HP Labs, Amisha Sheth of Intel, Ritesh Tyagi of Intel, and Norman Chang of ANSYS.

Friday

Cyber Security: with Alessandra Nardi of Cadence, Huafeng Yu of Boeing Research Technology, and Naresh Sheel of Intel.

After lunch, there will be a panel on Introduction to Blockchain.

The symposium will then wrap up early enough that the Friday afternoon traffic shouldn't be too bad (good luck with that).

Details

The conference will be held at SEMI Headquarters which are at 673 South Milpitas Boulevard in Milpitas. Both days start at 8am with breakfast, registration, and networking. The symposium proper starts at 8.45am. The first day runs all the way through dinner, the second day finishes mid-afternoon with a wrap-up after the panel session. Full details on the EDPS webpage.

Registration is handled vie Eventbrite.

I'll see you there.

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