Zhuo Li, DAC Chair, Plus Cadence@DAC

Yesterday was my DAC Preview post. As it happens, Cadence's Zhuo Li is this year's DAC chair. In his day job, Dr Li manages our clock-tree synthesis (CTS) inside Innovus. He is based in Austin.

At the end of this post I'll tell you about how you can interact with Cadence (and on two of the days I'm on duty so drop by and give me feedback on Breakfast Bytes or ask me questions about it).

I talked to Zhuo to get his perspective on DAC this year.

DAC 2020 will bring a virtual experience to DAC audience and it is the first time in 57 years of DAC history. Once DAC announced it was going virtual at the beginning of May, the whole program moved online within the space of a month. The virtual program keeps all traditional programs such as research papers, the DIET (Design/IP/Embedded) track, special sessions, panels, tutorials, and all poster sessions. While it is not possible to recreate the exact physical experience of traditional DAC, we target to bring people a unique and memorable virtual experience such the researchers/engineers/students from industry, academia, and government can still learn the latest frontier of technologies. We also provide a virtual platform for exhibitors to showcase their latest tools and products and people can also hang out at the “virtual happy hour” at the end of each day.

DAC has grown to be a conference with focus more than beyond traditional EDA, but extension to design, Machine learning/AI, embedded system and software, security and autonomous system. We hit record high submissions from both research and design/IP/embedded track.  On the research side, we have 984 submissions (record high number for at least the last five years), which is more than 20% than 2019. We needed to grow the TPC committee (more than 300 members, which is also the largest TPC ever) to review all papers and accepted 228 papers, which is 12% more than 2019 and 35% more than 2018. On DIET track, we also hit the record high number of submissions, where most of submissions are from the industry. We see a big increase in new areas, such as machine learning/AI (both on hardware architectures and how to use these algorithms on EDA algorithm/products). Other areas like security, embedded systems, and even traditional back-end EDA, see very health growth, too. I believe “this is a golden era of EDA, design, and chip architecture”.

A few more points. We still keep all the poster sessions and have several live chat sessions on all poster sessions to still keep that part more interactive. We had a historically high submission and participation from students on DAC fellow program. So far over 400+ students are registered and they will be partitioned into different groups and have chance to interact with other audiences. Cadence is sponsoring this program, too. As you already said in your preview post, we still maintain a virtual happy hour each day and I may have a live zoom session with audience at the end of each day as well.

Another thing that Zhuo told me was that he started doing a video blog for DAC this year, for the first time. There are ten of them, so I won't include them all here, the first goes back to last year when the call for papers opened (spoiler alert: you are too late). You can find them all on the DAC TV page. Here are the last two:

Cadence @ DAC

Every day from 10:30am to 1:30pm (Pacific), you can engage with Cadence. This is a sort of online version of the Expert Bar from the most recent DACs. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I'll be on duty. Officially, I'm covering Cadence Cloud on Wednesday, but you can ask me anything about Breakfast Bytes, the Cadence product line, technology...all the stuff that I cover on a daily basis on Breakfast Bytes.

Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA

This year's recipient of the Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA is Alessandra Nardi of Cadence. I asked her if there was going to be an award ceremony as usual (well, online, so not as usual). She told me that all she had been told was that "We have planned a virtual award networking event on Monday, July 20, and more details will be sent out later".

Alessandra will also be presenting at the Accellera Virtual Lunch on Thursday from 12:00pm to 1:00pm (in her capacity as the Chair of the Accellera Working Group on Functional Safety).

Cadence Academic Program

I put this in the earlier post, but Cadence Academic Network is exclusively sponsoring two student activities at DAC this year: Design Automation Summer School and the PhD forum. More than 410+ students from around the world have registered, in comparison to 40-50 at the in-person event. There are two tracks in the summer school – Technical development and Professional development. The technical track will be a small project using SystemC with a Stratus flow where the students can synthesize a small "chip" using the Cadence GPDK, and the professional development track will include a panel discussion by our recruiters where students will be able to ask any question they have always wanted to ask a recruiter. The PhD forum will be a virtual poster session with breakout rooms for students to talk to attendees.

The Matrix

Once again, for a full schedule, see the hard-to-find DAC "matrix".

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