Academic Network at DAC 2017

11 Jul 2017 • 3 minute read

Design Automatisation Conference (DAC) is the largest EDA conference in the world, where all important players in EDA industry show their production, at the same time, it is also the most important EDA conference for academia, where only the best papers of the year are presented. It is a huge honor for the students and professors to be invited to DAC and present their work to their cohorts and industry.

The academic activities start one day earlier, on Sunday with the A. Richard Newton Young Fellow Program which is for students who have won scholarships to attend DAC. On Sunday, these students were invited to a breakfast session, with Patrick Groeneveld, DAC Finance Chair, and Prof. Laleh Behjat from University of Calgary. Patrick and Prof. Laleh spoke to the studentsabout conference etiquettes and networking skills Fun Fact: Professor Arthur Richard Newton was one of the founders of SDA Systems. In 1988 SDA Systems became Cadence Design Systems. The breakfast was followed by the Design Automation Summer School. DASS started with the presentations of Prof. Onur Mutlu from ETH Zuerich, who in simple words explained Rowhammer attack and how to prevent it.

In another room on the same day was the ACM/IEEE Early Career Workshop for young faculty. The workshop introduced the members to effective ways to organize a conference, review papers and more. Cadence Academic Network got the opportunity to present its benefits for academics.

At the DAC opening ceremony on Monday the Cadence Academic Collaboration award was given to Prof. Andrew B. Kahng from UC San Diego. Professor Andrew Kahng is a long time supporter of Industry – Academia collaboration and has previously won the Best Paper Award for the paper «Toward New Synergies Between Academic Research and Commercial EDA» at CDNLive Silicon Valley in 2016.

On Monday evening, our team hosted a dinner for academics in EDA at a lovely Mexican restaurant. The dinner was attended by professors from around the world with a large presence of academics from APAC. Since DATE (DAC equivalent in EMEA) is attended by European academics, I met very few European professors at DAC. However, my colleague from Asia had the opportunity to connect with a lot of professors from APAC. ASP-DAC (DAC equivalent in APAC) is still a small event in comparison to DAC and DATE.

On Tuesday was the PhD Forum. The PhD Forum at the Design Automation Conference is a poster session co-sponsored by both ACM SIGDA and IEEE CEDA for PhD students to present and discuss their dissertation research with people in the EDA community.

For the readers, who are not too familiar with the structure of these societies, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society and SIGDA is Special Interest Group on Design Automatisation that promotes academic activities in EDA area. IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization for the advancement of tecnology, while CEDA is Council on EDA At the PhD forum, the Cadence Academic Network was recognized as the exclusive “Global Education Partner” by ACM SIGDA. An honor exclusively given to Cadence Academic Network for the very first time.

At the Cadence Theater at the booth, there were a couple of presentations by academics on different topics. Venkateshwar Kottapalli, Graduate Research Assistant, Texas A&M University talked about the need for teaching advanced verification to students. Prof. Paul Franzon and Prof. Rhett Davis from NCSU and members of CAEML center presented their thoughts on Machine Learning in EDA.

This year, the global Cadence Academic Network team traveled to Austin to experience the largest EDA conference. We hope to be back next year and make our presence even more stronger. It was a pleasure to meet and connect with all the professors and students at DAC. Hope to see you all next year!