With the 2014 Design Automation Conference (DAC) only 18 weeks away, the program is starting to come together. This year DAC will feature three new tracks: Automotive, IP and Security, along with the tradition of offering the best-in-class solutions that promise to advance electronic design automation (EDA) and embedded systems and software (ESS).
While the planning committees are working diligently to finalize the program, here are a few sneak previews that are worth noting in anticipation of the final program, which will be released in early April.
Special session highlights
Special sessions aim to highlight hot topics and raise awareness of key challenges faced by the EDA community. The special session topics span topics from the landscape of upcoming and future transistor technologies, the interconnect crisis, and the challenges and opportunities of designing heterogeneous systems to on-chip cortical computing and embedded resiliency. Sessions will feature key players from both industry and academia, such as:
- Dr. Thomas Theis, Director of Nanoelectronics Research Initiative at SRC, who will speak about SRC’s effort in emerging FET technologies that could re-enable voltage scaling;
- James Clarke, Manager of Research for Metals and Dielectrics at Intel, who will share his insights on scalability of interconnects for 10nm and beyond;
- Greg Sadowski, AMD Fellow, who will discuss design challenges facing integrated heterogeneous systems;
- Nikil Dutt, at UC Irvine, commenting on multi-layer dependability for memory subsystems;
- Subutai Ahmad, VP Engineering at Numenta, presenting the famous Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) Model for learning hardware.
Technical panel highlights
DAC 2014 will offer a highly engaging pool of technical panels, discussing key issues and controversial topics in today's EDA and electronics. Now that a majority of the panels are in the final formation stage, some topics for discussion that are sure to pique interest include:
- "The invasion of the body sensors" will discuss the technology and ethical challenges of implantable and wearable medical devices and their barriers to acceptance by the public.
- Two of the panels will discuss design at advanced technology nodes:
- What are the impacts in EDA tools and flow and how many respins should we target when designing with highly volatile transistors?
- And looking further out: Which of today's promising technology proposals will take off? EUV, 450mm, 3D, T-FET, Nanowires?
- Will we ever live in an EDA world where one super-vendor could provide all building tools to develop a chip? And, if that were to happen, would it kill innovation? This panel is sure to raise some controversial opinions.
Hot topic panels covering verification and cyper-physical system design are also being planned to complete the exciting offerings in the technical panels program.
Keynoters
With several new tracks being introduced at the 2014 conference, DAC will host a total of five engaging and thought-provoking keynoters. Three of the five are listed below.
- Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO and President, Imagination Technologies
- Dr. Cliff Hou, Vice President, R&D, TSMC
- Dual Keynote: Automating the Automobile
- Jim Tung, MathWorks Fellow, MathWorks
- James Buczkowski, Henry Ford Technical Fellow, Ford Motor Company
DAC 2014, hosted in San Francisco, will not only be consistent in staying on the forefront of electronic design, but will also offer outstanding training, education, exhibits and superb networking opportunities. Check out www.dac.com.
