My Experience at #61DAC
July 8, 2024
The theme of this year’s DAC was Chips to Systems which is a full circle type of thing since systems companies used to make their own chips. Old school computer companies were the biggest chip makers when I started in the semiconductor industry. IDMs like Motorola and Intel replaced them at the chip level. Shortly after I joined the industry a start-up company (Sun Microsystems) put HPC on our desktops with the slogan “The Network is the Computer” and changed computing forever.
Following Apple, other systems companies took control of their silicon with the likes of Tesla, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and many others who make chips for internal use only. More than half of the traffic on SemiWiki is now from systems companies which is a big shift to the left.
Intel's Gary Patton Shows the Way to a Systems Foundry at #61DAC
July 8, 2024
#61DAC was buzzing this year with talk of AI and multi-die, heterogeneous design. The promise of making 2.5/3D design and a chiplet ecosystem mainstream reality was the focus of a lot of the panels and presentations at the conference. AI is certainly a driver for this new design style, but the conversation was broader than just AI, as you will see. This new design style will require effort from every part of the semiconductor ecosystem, and this focus was on display during DAC. There is a focal point where all this work needs to come together to make it commercially available. That focal point is the foundry, and there was a keynote address on Tuesday morning at DAC that did a great job explaining how to open the door to the future. Let’s explore how Intel’s Gary Patton shows the way to a systems foundry.
DAC 61: EDA Addressing Growing System Complexity
July 3, 2024
At this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC), I was told that the committee had received some 1,500 technical paper and presentation submissions, and a 34% increase in research paper submissions, reflecting the many different approaches and requirements for growing electronics systems design complexity. That’s why the whole event was also rebranded to being the ‘chips to systems conference’.
Synopsys' Sashi Obilisetty is Honoured at DAC 2024
June 25, 2024
The award recognises individuals who have “significantly helped advance women in electronic design”. This year’s recipient is an entrepreneur, founding DualSoft in 1998, focusing on RT analysis, which was acquired by TansEDA in 2000. The following year, Sashi founded VeriEZ to address verification cycles. Sashi was also chief architect for silicon solutions at Google Cloud. She joined Synopsys in 2009 enabling design, verification, manufacturing and post-silicon domains and has most recently been spearheading the integration of AI into the company’s products.
EDA Industry Benefits from New Markets
June 25, 2024
The essential nature of EDA has become more apparent, he said, as semiconductor companies are becoming increasingly like systems companies and systems companies are becoming increasingly like semiconductor companies, he said. Software development and silicon development have been separate “arms races” which have now “become intertwined” due in part to the introduction of AI/ML and engineering software convergence across the industry.
Podcast EP229: A Detailed Look at the DAC Engineering Track with Ambar Sarkar
June 21, 2024
Dan is joined by Dr. Ambar Sarkar, a member of the Design Automation Conference executive committee and the program chair of the Engineering Tracks. He has a broad background covering both software and hardware R&D. He has contributed to industry standards in areas such as functional verification and IP security. He is the IEEE Computer Society’s representative for IEEE USA’s AI and Autonomous Policy Committee. Ambar is an individual contributor at NVIDIA where he enjoys working on compute and storage resource optimizations across large engineering teams. He is now also exploring the area of generative AI.
Intel Harnesses Hackathons to Tackle Hardware Vulnerabilities
April 26, 2024
Ever since the first Hack@DAC hacking competition in 2017, thousands of security engineers have helped discover hardware-based vulnerabilities, develop mitigation methods, and perform root cause analysis of issues found.
Intel initially decided to organize the competition, which draws security professionals from academia and industry partners around the world, to raise awareness about hardware-based vulnerabilities and to promote the need for more detection tools, says Arun Kanuparthi, a principal engineer and offensive security researcher at Intel. Another goal behind Hack@DAC, capture-the-flag competitions, and other hackathonsis to draw the attention of chip designers, to motivate them to design silicon more securely, he says.
Designing the Future: The Design Automation Conference Celebrates 60 Years!
June 9, 2023
In this week’s podcast, my guest is DAC60 Engineering Tracks Program Chair Ambar Sarkar. Ambar and I chat all about this year’s Design Automation Conference including the new aspects of this year’s exhibition and conference, the RISC-V zone, what you can expect from this year’s visionary talks and keynotes, and the details of the DAC60 Celebration Panel called Designing the Future. Also this week, I investigate how AI coupled with the DNA of 233 different primate species could help us unlock the mysteries of disease-causing genetic mutations in humans.
A new scenario for the end of semiconductor miniaturization, a decline in demand rather than a technological limit
August 18, 2022
Until now, the semiconductor industry has developed along the lines of miniaturization. Two semiconductor-related events held in the United States in July 2022 clearly demonstrated that this axis had changed. In the background, there is an explosion in the amount of data to be processed due to digital transformation (DX), the introduction of AI (artificial intelligence)/machine learning, and the spread of IoT (Internet of Things). As a semiconductor technology to deal with this, expectations for miniaturization, which is approaching its limit, are rapidly withering away, and instead, a hot gaze has been focused on heterogeneous integration ( Fig. 1 ). It used to be thought that the end of the miniaturization race would come due to technical difficulties, but it seems that it will be met by a decline in needs.
AMD CTO, cross-company design and manufacturing required to win in the 2.5D/3D era
July 14, 2022
At the 59th Design Automation Conference (July 10-14, 2022, San Francisco, USA), the largest semiconductor design event, the main exhibition and academic conference began on July 11, 2022 (local time). At the conference on the morning of the 11th, Mr. Mark Papermaster (Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology and Engineering) of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) took the podium as the first keynote speaker (Fig. 1). As the limit of miniaturization of semiconductors approaches, we discussed technologies and efforts to meet the ever-increasing needs of AI (artificial intelligence)/HPC (high performance computing) processing.
Make semiconductors secure… or else
Dec 15, 2021
Last week, the 58th Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco dropped a few hints that the semiconductor industry will finally consider making chips secure before manufacturing. However, not without kicking, screaming and complaining. Full Article: Cyber Protection Magazine, Lou Covey
The Return Of DAC In-Person
Dec 15, 2021
Apart from masked faces everywhere, you could be excused for not knowing that there was a pandemic going on. Sure, the numbers were down, the show floor was smaller, and most of the parties didn’t happen, but everyone was so happy to be able to bump elbows with their colleagues. Full Article: Semiconductor Engineering, Brian Bailey
The Practitioners View of DAC - Design, IP and Embedded
Dec 7, 2020
Next year will mark the 58th year for the Design Automation Conference. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact this event dates back to 1964, when rock ‘n roll was new, cars were big and computers were even bigger. In its early days, the event was called the Design Automation Workshop. Pictured above is the cover of the very first proceedings. It’s no longer available on Amazon unfortunately. Throughout its storied life, DAC has presented some of the most advanced and important innovations that have shaped the technology world around us. The conference began and continues today as a place to present high quality, cutting edge research. Over the years, exhibits were added to showcase the results of this research. More recently, a series of tracks were added that showcase the practitioners view of DAC – design, IP and embedded. I’d like to focus on this part of the conference. Full Article: Semiwiki.com, Mike Gianfagna
Accellera Tackles Functional Safety
Aug 6, 2020
During DAC, Accellera had a workshop about functional safety. In case you don’t know, Accellera has a relatively new working group (WG) on Functional Safety. The chair is Cadence’s Alessandra Nardi, who coincidentally also received the Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA during DAC (you can read more about that in my post Alessandra Nardi Receives Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA). But functional safety is, for sure, not all about Cadence. Full article: Semiengineering.com, Paul McLellan
Cooley's 11 Quickie Questions Aout Virtual DAC '20 Last Week!
Aug 2, 2020
Just a little funny history, after I started my Silicon Valley Blog in 2009 several EDA CEOs bullied me into creating my own site to compete with John Cooley’s DeepChip.com. Competition is good, right? One good friend and CEO even suggested I call it DeepNenni.com. Thankfully we came up with something a little less awkward, SemiWiki.com. Ten years later here we are the #1 EDA/IP/Foundry portal and the rest as they say is history. Full article: Semiwiki.com, Daniel Nenni
Engineering Within Constraints
Jul 30, 2020
One of the themes of DAC this year was the next phase of machine learning. It is as if CNNs and RNNs officially have migrated from the research community and all that is left now is optimization. The academics need something new. Quite correctly, they have identified power as the biggest problem associated with learning and inferencing today, and a large part of that problem is associated with memory access forced upon all architectures by the memory architectures imposed by the von Neumann architecture that propelled CPUs for the past 50 years. Full article: Semiengineering.com, Brian Bailey
A Virtual DAC Experience
Jul 24, 2020
This has been the first virtual conference for me, and I will say I was not sure what to expect. I did moderate a panel for it, but that was pre-recorded because the panelists did not care to be awake and performing live for what would have been 3 a.m. for them. I hosted a virtual happy hour, I conducted many interviews, attended sessions, keynotes and other events, but one thing stands out to me more than anything else – virtual panels actually can be better than the physical things. Full article: Semiengineering.com, Brian Bailey
DAC 2020 Day One
Jul 21, 2020
DAC 2020 is like no other Design Automation Conference. It is virtual for this year — and hopefully only this year.
The COVID pandemic has proven that face-to-face meetings and conferences are invaluable for many reasons. But with none of the distractions of a traditional conference, focusing on the content was easy. And because the sessions have been pre-recorded, the speakers for each session were online in the chat feature, and attendees began to ask questions and make comments right away. That meant there was a very lively discussion that all attendees could see and participate in. Full article: Semiengineering.com, Ann Steffora Mutschler
The Official SemiWiki Virtual DAC 2020 Must See List!
Jul 17, 2020
This is going to be a record setting year for DAC content and attendance, absolutely!
My first DAC was in 1984 in Albuquerque New Mexico, right out of College, and I married my beautiful wife two months later. Thirty six DAC’s later I have four grown children, grandchildren, and the number one semiconductor design portal in the world. What an amazing ride!
This year however will be one for the record books. 57th DAC has gone virtual enabling a world wide conference experience. Due to the pandemic SemiWiki activity has increased dramatically which is a good sign for virtual conferences. Semiconductor professionals are now online more than ever before and the surge continues. The question is: Will we go back to live conferences in 2021? One of the biggest arguments for live events is the networking. It will be interesting to see how the virtual networking goes next week. We can better answer that question in our post DAC coverage. Full article: Semiwiki.com, Daniel Nenni
A Tour of This Year's DAC IP Track with Randy Fish
Jul 10, 2020
DAC is a complex event with many “moving parts”. While the conference has gone virtual this year (as all events have), the depth of the event remains the same. The technical program has always been of top quality, with peer-reviewed papers presented across many topics and across the world. This is also the oldest part of DAC, dating back 57 years. DAC has grown to include many other events that make up the entire experience. A major trade show with topical events presented in pavilions on the show floor, workshops, tutorials, a designer track and an IP track to name a few. Full article: Semiwiki.com, Mike Gianfagna
Podcast: DAC 2020 preview – AI, ML and RISC-V on rise
Jul 2, 2020
In the latest edition of my embedded edge with Nitin podcast, we learn about some of the trends at this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC 2020). When we spoke to the program track chairs in the podcast, it’s apparent that the key trends this year are the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in EDA tools, and the prominence of RISC-V, with 25% of papers featuring projects using RISC-V. Full article: Embedded.com, Nitin Dahad
Alessandra Nardi Receives Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA
Jul 1, 2020
Cadence's Alessandra Nardi, software engineering group director, is the 2020 recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Award, an annual honor that recognizes individuals who have significantly helped advance women in electronic design. The award is named for the late Marie R. Pistilli. Although she had retired, she was one of the driving forces in the creation of the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and all that it has become. Her name lives on in the award and in MP Associates, the company that still runs DAC. Full article: Breakfast Bytes Blog, Paul McLellan
Do You Love DAC? Here’s Why I Do
Jun 8, 2020
Hello all, and welcome to DAC Season. As you all probably know by now, there are some twists to DAC Season this year. First, it’s being held July 20 – 24 this year instead of in June. I believe there was one other time the conference spilled into July, so this isn’t the norm. DAC, like pretty much every other conference these days has also gone virtual. Where to locate DAC has always been the source of a lot of passionate opinion and discussion. This time, we get a pass on that. General DAC Chair Zhuo LiThe conference chair this year is Dr. Zhuo Li from Cadence. Dr. Li has quite the challenge, presiding over a conference that is doing a lot of things for the first time with respect to both space and time. You can watch his series of video blogs that chronicle the momentum of DAC and... Full article: SemiWiki.com, Mike Gianfagna
Do You Love DAC? Here's Why I Do
Jun 7, 2020
Hello all, and welcome to DAC Season. As you all probably know by now, there are some twists to DAC Season this year. First, it’s being held July 20 – 24 this year instead of in June. I believe there was one other time the conference spilled into July, so this isn’t the norm. DAC, like pretty much every other conference these days has also gone virtual. Where to locate DAC has always been the source of a lot of passionate opinion and discussion. This time, we get a pass on that. Full article: Semiwiki.com, Mike Gianfagna
DAC 2019 参加報告 ─半導体の開発技術および応用に関す る世界最大の国際会議・展示会─
Dec 2, 2019
DAC（ Design Automation Conference）は1964 年から続く半導体設計自動化技術に関する国際会議で，第56 回目となる今年はネバダ州ラスベガスのラスベガス・コンベンション・センターで開催された（図-1）．論文投稿数は815 本（採択数202 本，採択率は24.8%）となり前回に比べて約20% 増えたが，参加者数については米中貿易摩擦の影響で，今回は中国からの参加者が少なく，前回比40% 減の約4,000 名だった．Full pdf article
DAC 2020 - Call for Contributions
Oct 28, 2019
My first DAC was in 1987 so I’ve seen our industry expand greatly over the years, and I expect that #57DAC on July 19-23, 2020 in SFO to be another exciting event to attend for semiconductor professionals from around the globe. What makes DAC so compelling for me to visit are the people, exhibitors, panel discussions, technical presentations and industry buzz that you just cannot glean from a blog or glossy brochure. Full article: Semiwki.com, Daniel Payne
Design Automation Conference: An Important Update for the Electronics Industry
Aug 20, 2019
Founded in 1964, DAC is one of the longest running conferences especially tailored to the design and automation of electronic circuits and systems. And, according to Technical Program Chair Harry Foster (Mentor), an industry authority and sought-after expert on formal verification, 2019 was a record year in terms of research paper submissions and accepted papers: 815 papers were submitted, and 202 accepted (35% EDA; 32% Design; 17% Embedded Systems and 16% Security/Safety/ Autonomous Systems). Just these numbers are a clear sign, that the DAC is still going strong. Full article: EEPower, Henning Wriedt
Top 10 Reasons to Go to DAC
May 24, 2019
The Design Automation Conference is coming up soon. It's in Las Vegas from June 2 to 6 in the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). I was putting together a post on what I thought were good reasons to attend, but I decided to call up Rob Aitken of Arm, who is this year's general chair, and get his perspective, too. Full Article
#55DAC: Must-see New Deep Learning Processors, Embedded FPGA Technologies, and SoC Design Solutions in the DAC 2018 IP Track
May 11, 2018
Some of the most valuable events at DAC are the IP Track sessions, which give small- and medium-sized companies a chance to share innovations that might not get much attention elsewhere. Full Article: ChipEstimate.com, Ty Garibay
Electronic Design, April 27, 2018 - DAC2018 – Teardown
Apr 27, 2018
Today, autonomous vehicles are being road tested, but their future depends on whether automakers can develop production line tests on mass-produced vehicles to ensure they’re safe. Full article: Electronic Design, Sam Davis