Why Attend CadenceLIVE Americas?

5 Aug 2020 • 5 minute read

We renamed our user conference to CadenceLIVE (from CDNLive) just in time for it not to be live and to go virtual. The first conference is CadenceLIVE Americas coming up from August 11th to 13th. Registration is now open.

This is a global event. Coming up:

Taiwan, August 27th
China, September 1st
India, September 9-10th
Europe, October 13-14th
Japan, October 23rd
Israel, November 3rd

Full details on the CadenceLIVE 2020 page.

As I do each year, let me give you some good reasons to attend. I'm afraid the wonderful food and drink is not a reason this year, nor the face-to-face networking. We do still have giveaways though!

So without further ado, the biggest reasons to attend CadenceLIVE (August 11th to 13th remember). The days all start at 9am. On 11th and 12th the even runs until 3.00pm, and on 13th until 1.00pm. The days are getting shorter. Winter is coming.

1 Lip-Bu Tan's Keynote

Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence's CEO, will open the conference with a keynote titled The Data-Centric Electronics Revolution. One of the catchy phrases that you hear all the time is that "Data is the New Oil". I like to point out that data is more like oil than you think. Without a lot of processing, it is not very useful. Maybe neural networks are the new gasoline.

By the way, you have to watch Lip-Bu's keynote live, like all the keynotes. It will not be available for replay afterward.

2 Anirudh Devgan's Keynote

Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's President, will give the opening keynote on the second day with a presentation titled Computational Software for Intelligent System Design. I've covered computational software in a post at the end of last year cleverly titled Computational Software. Another relevant post is Computation and the Data Explosion.

Traditionally, Anirudh announces a new product during his keynote...but you'll just have to watch to see if he does this year.

3 AWS's Nafea Bshara

Nafea is a VP and distinguished engineer, at AWS. He was a co-founder and CTO of Annapurna labs. For more about Annapurna, seem my posts:

His presentation is titled How the Cloud and Industry Collaboration helped Bend the Curve for Chip Development.

4 Facebook's Vijay Rao

Vijay is Facebook's Director of Technology Strategy. His keynote is titled Accelerating Facebook's Hardware Infrastructure. As it happens, I have written about Facebook's server infrastructure before, in my post Open Server Summit: How to Install 5,000 Servers Per Day. He will present on the first day after Lip-Bu.

5 Alberto Sangiovani-Vincentelli

Thursday's keynote is by co-founder of SDA (that merged with ECAD to create Cadence a long time ago) and a long-time board member of Cadence, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. To read more about his history, see my post Alberto and the Origins of the EDA Industry.

Alberto's keynote is titled Cadence and Academia: From Transistors to Systems with Computational Software.

6 Technical Tracks

As usual, there are technical tracks (which are called "breakout sessions" on the high-level schedules). Most sessions are 30 minutes with a few in digital design that are an hour. To make it easy for people to attend only the sessions in which they are interested, sessions are grouped into a single day, or for the bigger topics, into two of the three days.

Note that only some of these presentations will be available for later replay (it depends on the speaker and the speaker's organization). So best is to follow the first rule of politics: "be there".

Custom/Analog Design (on Tuesday 11th)
RF Design (on Wednesday 12th)
Mixed-Signal Design (on Thursday 13th)
Digital Design and Signoff (on Tuesday and Wednesday)
PCB and System Analysis (on Tuesday and Wednesday)
Verification (on Tuesday and Wednesday)
Automotive (on Wednesday)
Design IP and Processor IP (on Tuesday)
Cloud Solutions (on Wednesday)
Security (on Tuesday)
Cadence Academic Network (on Thursday)

You can see the Detailed Schedule for information on the presentations and presenting companies.

7 Designer Expo

The Expo is divided into three halls. In Hall 1 are Cadence plus the Platinum sponsors. Let me tell you about the Cadence booth. I say "booth" but I'm totally unclear what terminology to use in these virtual versions of what were on-site conferences. The current paradigm seems to be to try and make the structure of the conference the same as usual.

On the Cadence booth, topics addressed are:

Chat with Us
Digital Design and Signoff
Custom/RF
System/PCB
Verification
Design and Processor IP
Cloud
Solutions
Learning and Support
Academic Network

8 Prizes!

There are prizes. You can get points for all sorts of things, such as filling out your survey at the end of a session you attended, or visiting partners in the Designer Expo, or downloading content. At the end of the show, depending on how many points you have, you can pick various prizes and we will ship them to your home address. One caveat, there is no international shipping.

Giveaways include water bottles, desk vacuums, and laptop stands. Up to a camping chair or popup beach tent. Or how about a stylish pair of Cadence socks (in 3 different color schemes).

If you win a prize, you can add on for free a hard-copy of this year's edition of my book, A Year of Breakfasts 2020: AI, Photonics, Security, Auto, 5G, SiP...and Coffee (I believe you add it at checkout). Or if you can't wait, you can get a copy on Amazon by clicking on the picture of the books (but I'm afraid it's $9.99).

Usual caveat of "while supplies last."

Schedule

Here is the high-level schedule. Remember that what are called "sessions" here are what I called "technical tracks" above. Times are Pacific.

Registration

For more details including registration, see the event page for CadenceLIVE Americas. Or click on the image.

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