It gives me a very nice, somewhat nostalgic, feeling after attending the 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] DAC. There was a period during my final academic year in 1990 and my first job when I used to search through good technical papers in DAC proceedings and try implementing those concepts in my project work. In general, representation from ‘R&D… Read More
Application Specific Integrated Comedy
Tuesday night I got to meet an old colleague. OK, this is DAC, that is hardly a story. I was at the Synopsys media dinner and John Koeter handed out free wristbands to the Stars of IP party taking place later that evening. Remember, Synopsys is #3 in IP overall and #1 in interface IP. Talking of which, earlier in the day I was at the Synopsys… Read More
DAC: Self-driving Cars
The keynote on Tuesday at DAC was by Jeffrey Owens of Delphi. For those of you that don’t know, Delphi used to be the part of General Motors dealing with electronics spun out from GM as a separate company in 1999.
Jeffrey pointed out that a modern automobile is the most complex device any of us own, with over 100M lines of code (loc)… Read More
DAC Keynote: Moore’s Law Isn’t Dead
There were two keynotes at DAC this morning. I think the official designation of the first one was a “visionary talk” and the main difference was that it was only 15 minutes long. Vivek Singh, an Intel fellow, talked about Moore’s Law at 50: No End in Sight.
He started with a graph showing transistor speed versus… Read More
Turning the Automotive Development Process Upside Down
Most of us drive automobiles and have a vague idea that the development of our cars takes many years, millions of dollars, is a proprietary process and require huge factories to produce. A relatively new company called Local Motors founded in 2007 has started to turn the automotive development process upside down because they do… Read More
Vacationing with the Fabless Semiconductor Ecosystem!
The Design Automation Conference is the largest and most diverse event in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Next week in San Francisco you will see technology and people you have never seen before. You will benefit from the efforts of hundreds of thousands of semiconductor professionals like myself who have dedicated their… Read More
Ten Things to Do in San Francisco the Way the Locals Do
DAC is in San Francisco, of course, and perhaps you have a day or two to do explore the city. Guidebooks will tell you to visit most of these places but there are much better ways to see them than they typically recommend. Follow these instructions and pretend you are a local.
1. Ride a Cable Car. But don’t wait in line for 45 minutes at Union… Read More
SemiWiki at #52DAC: Nominated for Best Paper Award!
Blogging for Semiwiki is a very good exercise to prepare a paper submission at DAC. Writing a short article using about 600 words to pass one message, and try to deliver this message as clearly as possible. Writing a paper for DAC is very similar, as you have to be synthetic and develop a thesis in 5 slides, no more, as it’s a time limited… Read More
"An art can only be learned in the workshop of those who are winning their bread by it"
That was said by the novelist Samuel Butler, but it is not a bad description of why you should spend the Sunday at DAC in one of the workshops that are taking place that day.
One workshop is on Design Automation for Beyond CMOS Technologies. Before getting to design automation, it is good to start with which technologies are potentially… Read More
DAC, IP, Parties and Philanthropy
My typical DACtrip is a blur of non-stop interviews with EDA, IP and Semiconductor vendors followed by a few dozen blogs to share what I’ve learned. I just became aware of something a bit different at DAC this year by talking with Jill Jacobs, an organizer for an event dubbed Heart of Technology (HoT) where they raise money for… Read More
An Insight into Building Quantum Computers