This Was the CadenceLIVE Europe 2023 Academic Track

Pictures tell more than 1000 words, so here are the best moments of CadenceLIVE Europe 2023 

Paul Cunningham delivered the Cadence keynote address, sharing about the latest Cadence products and initiatives and the successful technology partnership with McLaren! 

During the panel on chiplets, Prof. Davide Rossi from the University of Bologna shared insights into how students can be educated on this new topic. Questions from the audience indicated that not all universities have recognized the importance of educating students about packaging yet, but hearing from leaders in the field can help build awareness about why and how to incorporate into curriculum.   

Traditionally, Europractice kicks off the Academic Track with an overview of new Cadence tools in the Europractice software bundle. One of the remarkable new tools is Integrity, a Cadence tool that enables 3D-chip design and analysis. Now there are no excuses left not to teach this topic at universities! 

We have mentioned Professor Francesco Fornetti several times on our blogs and LinkedIn articles. As a new Lead Institution for Microwave and RF, Professor Fornetti was invited to speak about his approach to using Cadence tools not only for education but also for assessment.  

Next up, Soumyajit Sinha presented his Master Thesis work focused on porting the VLSI Fundamentals Education Kit to the SkyWater130 PDK. It is quite a jump from 600nm educational PDK to 130nm industrial PDK, so it needs to be ensured that different blocks of the reference design are ported in the right manner and that the design still works properly. Stay tuned for more announcements about the availability of the SkyWater130 Cadence PDK and the new version of the VLSI Education Kit! 

We concluded the Academic Track with talks from key professors sharing about their innovative work. Yannick Uhlmann from Reutlingen University presented his work on “Integration of Cadence Spectre into a Machine Learning Pipeline for Modeling Analog Circuits” and Aristotelis Tsekouras from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki presented a paper on using Cadence design flow, including Genus and Joules, for Designing Point Multiplier and Multiply and Accumulate Components. 

In the RF track, the winners of the RF Design Contest, held at Ramon Llull University, presented their solution which used AWR software products. Jaime Gui came to Munich as the team representative, accepting prizes on behalf of the other members, Maria Crespo and Joan Francesc Aragó. 

Cadence supports student design teams by offering access to our system design and analysis tools and inviting some teams to present at CadenceLIVE. Day two started with a presentation from the Técnico Solar Boat team from Lisbon. It was exciting to hear about how the team is using Cadence CFD software to optimize the shape of the hydrofoils as well as the contra-rotating propeller design. 

Team Bath Racing Electric presented how they used Cadence CelsiusEC software for the battery cooling solution of their electric racing car, which doesn’t violate the numerous rules of the competition. Keeping the battery cool is compliant with the race regulations, more efficient, and most importantly, improves the safety of the competitors.  

The rest of the day contained more presentations from innovators in the industry with the Entrepreneur track. First, we heard from OQmented GmbH, a company that is working on miniaturizing augmented reality glasses. This will make them handier and more convenient in comparison to today’s bulky VR glasses. Professor Wolfgang Krautschneider, the founder of Implatronic, explained how an implant can be inserted into a cancer tumor to observe its growth. Normally this is done via MRT or X-rays, but such procedures can only be done every two to three months, while an implant can deliver data three to four times a day. Prof. Krautschneider has predicted that electronic implants will become much more common in the future to be able to observe different functions of the human body. 

As a part of CadenceLIVE Europe, we host the Masters Thesis Award for EDA and Academic Design. The winners are invited to present their thesis to industry experts. The masters thesis award for EDA was awarded to Till Moldenhauer from Reutlingen University. Till made a survey on the available ML algorithms in automated analog circuit sizing and evaluated which algorithms are best suited for what kind of circuits. 

Dominik Hiltbrunner, from FHNW in Switzerland, received the Masters Thesis Award for Academic Design Created using Cadence Tools. Dominik created a finite-impulse-responsive digital-to-analog converter and analyzed its behavior. 

The last session of the academic track was a panel discussion with the intriguing topic: How Does EDA Benefit from the AI Revolution? The participants of the panel, Rod Metcalfe from Cadence, Jean-Christophe Glas from Arm, Hussam Amrouch from TU Munich, and Hammond Pearce from University of New South Wales in Sydney (UNSW Sydney) discussed various aspects of applying generative AI in EDA to a packed room. According to the moderator, Rosa Markarian, EDA is one of few industries that doesn’t perceive Generative AI as a job killer, but actually as a welcome solution to increase the productivity of engineers and to counter the widening engineer gap. But of course, there are numerous issues to be solved, like copyright issues of the created code or hallucination of GPT systems. 

In order to teach the next generation of students about the benefits and the risks of generative AI, Cadence, Arm, TU Munich, UNSW Sydney, University of Southampton and Europractice announced a GPT Design Contest, where participants have 24 hours to create a design, which corresponds to a specification and will be verified using Cadence Verification IP using a GPT system. The design contest will be held during the DATE 2024 conference. More details to come…!

All sessions have been recorded and will be available on the CadenceLIVE portal.