CDNLive EMEA 2019, Impressions from the Academic Track

CDNLive EMEA 2019 was held May 6-8 in Munich, Germany. Bayern Munich did not qualify for the Champions League this year, so we were completely undisturbed and could listen to presentations, visit the exhibition, explore new ideas on collaboration and simply network. Here are some highlights of the Academic Track.

We had 17 paper submissions, 9 of which were accepted by the Program Committee. The submissions were from different European countries, like Belgium, Germany, UK, Russia, Switzerland and Sweden, but if we take into account the nationalities of the presenters, then we met people from Brazil and China too, who came to Europe to study and will hopefully stay, since Europe needs bright minds to keep its competitive advantage.

Like previous years, the first presentation was given by Europractice. John McLean and Bryony Howards made some exciting announcements, including HyperV images. Through Europractice, all Cadence software will be packed into a single Linux-image, which can then be installed on a Windows computer and connected to the university license server. According to John the future is cloudy, because of soon-to-come announcements regarding AWS-based cloud-computing offered by Europractice.

Another Europractice announcement was regarding the Cadence Digital Badge initiative. Digital Badges allow students and professors to become Cadence certified in Virtuoso, Allegro, Innovus, and more! They can be earned by passing a certification exam on a certain Cadence technology. The Digital Badge can then be shared on their email signature or across social media platforms, like LinkedIn to prove their knowledge of Cadence tools. 

The Cadence Academic Network has Lead Institutions, which are lighthouse universities that act as a guiding light to other universities for how Cadence technology can be used for classroom teaching and Fundamental Research.  This year we have nominated four new Lead Institutions:

• TU Dresden for HLS and SystemC
• Reutlingen University for Analog Layout Design and Verification
• University of Lübeck for Digital Implementation and Synthesis and Low-Power Verification
• Brandenburg University of Technology for Tensilica Processor IP

As an old tradition the new Lead Institutions present themselves in the Academic Track to tell about their research focus and how they use Cadence tools.

Professor Thomas Melham from Oxford University explains formal verification of output of the HLS tools

The Cadence Academic Network organized the second Master Thesis Award. Professors were invited to submit their students’ master thesis with a recommendation letter to be considered for the Best Master Thesis Award. We received eight submissions! The program chairs and the general chair worked together to decide on the best thesis. It was a tough decision and at the end the jury decided to select two papers.Since the theses were on completely different topics, it would not be fair to compare them, thus we picked them both. 

The first Best Paper Award was rewarded to Jens Karrenbauer from Leibniz University Hannover for his thesis: “Automated Design Space Exploration of Digital Audio Processors for Hearing Aids”.

Ye Ding from Technical University Munich received the second Best Paper Award for the thesis: “Procedural Capacitor Placement and Routing in Charge Redistribution ADCs with Generalised Capacitor Ratios by Nonlinearity Analysis Considering Parasitics”. Also, special mentioning was provided to Marcel Mettler from TU Munich for his master thesis on EDA research called “Deep Learning Techniques to Improve the Synthesis of Application-specific NoCs”. It has machine learning in the title, so what can go wrong here?

We had presentations from a number of great contributors, including: Zhan Gao from imec, who recently won the LATS Best Paper award; a status update on the RESCUE project; Hannes Ramon from Ghent University spoke about “PSS: Gearing Up for Large-Signal Simulation,” for which he got the best paper award for the Academic Track; and more. All papers will be downloadable from proceedings page rather soon. Congratulations to all from the Cadence Academic Network team!

Professor Michael Huebner welcomes Zhan Gao, Cadence resident at imec

We also heard from Daniel Bayer who is a Cadence employee that programs in his spare time. As a result, he was able to develop a Rapid UVM Generator, which simplifies the generation of UVM-e testbenches. Using this generator will help teaching verification, which is urgently required by the industry. 

Last but not least, the Cadence Academic Network has started offering a platform for startups, which gives them the opportunity to create a Proof-of-Concept prototype using Cadence tools at a reduced cost. Xenergic from Lund/Sweden and aiCTX from Switzerland presented their vision on future computing with ultra-low power memories and neuromorphic processors, which they were able to develop because of the new offering from the Cadence Academic Network. The future looks bright for bright ideas!

Xenergic CTO Prof. Joachim Rodrigues explains concepts behind the ultra-low energy memories.

Neuromorphic computing from aiCTX  

We’re looking forward to seeing you next year at CDNLive EMEA 2020 and don’t forget to submit the papers for next year’s Master Thesis Award!