DAC Keynotes: Mark Your Calendar

DAC starts in San Francisco on June 8th. The kickoff keynote at 9.20am that morning is by Brian Otis of Google. He is a director at Google[x]. According to Wikipedia:Google X, stylized as Google[x], is a semi-secret facility run by Google dedicated to making major technological advancements. It is located about a half mile from Google’s corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View.
Brian is also a Research Associate Professor at the not-so-secret University of Washington in Seattle. His keynote is titled Google Smart Lens: IC Design and Beyond. Google Smart Lens is a contact lens that also continuously monitors blood sugar levels for diabetics. Last July Novartis announced that they were partnering with Google to create a commercial product. One of the things that will change as wearable medical products become widespread is this type of continuous monitoring. Today we have very little information about our bodies when we are sick, and pretty much none when we are healthy.But this is DAC and so is about design. In Brian’s own words:I’ll share thoughts on the scarcity of power, extreme miniaturization, and end-to-end connected systems that span the design space from transistors to the cloud. Along the way, I’ll cover chip design techniques for body-worn systems and wireless sensors and present examples of constantly-connected devices for improving healthcare. These areas present tough unsolved problems at the interface between the IC and the outside world that cannot be solved by transistor technology scaling alone. Novel power sources, low power IC design techniques, microscale user interface technologies, and new system integration techniques will be a few of the enabling technologies for these emerging systems.
Tuesday’s keynote is also at 9.20am and is by Jeffrey Owens who is the CTO at Delphi Automotive. His talk is titled The Design of Innovation That Drives Tomorrow. When people think of high tech devices, the first things that come to mind are not cars, trucks and vans. Today’s vehicles possess more processing power than anything most consumers own or will purchase. A typical car is equipped with more than 50 computers designed to operate at automotive grade capabilities for an extended period of time. Electronics and design automation will play a critical role in shaping the future of automotive by providing design technology that helps save lives, protect the environment and provide a satisfying in-car experience for drivers and passengers alike.Keeping to the automotive theme, on Wednesday morning at 9am there will be a keynote panel Cyber Threats to Connected Cars: Staying Safe Requires More Than Following the Rules of the Road moderated by John McElroy of Blue Sky Productions. The first presenter is John Massimilla of General Motors who has the wonderful James Bond job title as Chief Product Cybersecurity Officer, Vehicle and Vehicle Services Cybersecurity. Next up, Craig Smith of OpenGarages.org a community driven vehicle research and exploration group.Then, on Thursday at 9.15am John Rodgers of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will talk about Electronics for the Human Body. Biology is soft, curvilinear and adaptable; silicon technology is rigid, planar and immutable. Electronic systems that eliminate this profound mismatch in properties create opportunities for devices that can intimately integrate with the body, for diagnostic, therapeutic or surgical function with important, unique capabilities in biomedical research and clinical healthcare. But wait, there’s more.At 9am on Tuesday there is also a visionary talk from Vivek Singh who is an Intel fellow on Moore’s Law at 50: No End in Sight. You don’t need me to give you the background on Moore’s Law. Vivek’s talk will provide some examples of how complex problems have been overcome in recent technology nodes, including those from the field of Computational Lithography. Inverse Lithography and Source Mask Optimization are two such examples that have helped extend the life of 193 patterning. Such innovations, fed by a rich technology pipeline, give us confidence that Moore’s Law will continue.The DAC page with more details of the keynotes is here.