DAC: Automotive, IP and Security

DAC is in the first week of June in San Francisco as I’m sure you already know if you are reading this. Historically DAC has focused on electronic design automation (EDA) and embedded software and systems (ESS). This year there are three new areas: automotive, Intellectual Property (IP) and security.

Automotive
Ever increasing feature content enabled by electronics and software and the associated complexity has made development of automotive electronics and software amongst the largest challenges for the automotive industry. Today, the functionality, efficiency, time-to-market, cost, quality, safety, and security of a new vehicle are determined more by embedded systems and software than by any other factor. The Automotive Track is a new, unique forum addressing design automation and design methodologies to enable automotive designers and integrators to meet their unprecedented challenges.

There is a dual keynote Automating the Automobileby Henry Buczkowski, the Henry Ford Technical Fellow at (surprise) Ford Motor Company and Jim Tung, Mathworks fellow at (surprise again) Mathworks.

IP
This year DAC introduces the IP Track on Monday, focused on semiconductor IP. This track includes six sessions running in two rooms adjoining the exhibit floor, and provides creators and users of IP with an open forum to exchange information on state-of-art IP products and the tools and methodology to create, incorporate and validate IP in SoCs. Supporting the IP technical track is the exhibition floor which includes over 20 leading IP suppliers suppliers and providers.

The associated keynote is The Great SoC Challenge (IP to the Rescue!)is by Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies.

Security
As design of integrated circuits (ICs) and embedded systems is increasingly global, designers and users of ICs, intellectual property (IP) and embedded systems are increasingly facing trust issues. These systems are vulnerable to a variety of hardware-centric attacks, such as side channel analysis, reverse engineering, IP piracy, hardware Trojans and counterfeiting. The Security Track at DAC highlights the emergence of security and trust as important dimensions of hardware and embedded systems design, dimensions that must be considered side-by-side with power, performance, and reliability.

The security keynote The Intel Security Architecture Visionis by Ernie Brickell, Chief Security Architect at Intel.

The technical program for DAC will be announced on March 27th, next Thursday. Details about DAC are on the (all new) DAC website at dac.com.

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