Nov 11, 2026 · Frank Schirrmeister

Disclosure: I serve as Research Panels Chair of DAC 2027. This article is written in that capacity and reflects my personal views, not those of my employer, Synopsys.

One Week Out

On November 11, the abstract deadline for DAC 2027 research manuscripts passed. Full manuscripts follow on November 18. If you are an author, you know the feeling: the title is registered, the claim is on record, and the next seven days belong to the experiments section.

The same day, Nov 18, 2026, closes two calls that get far less attention and take far less than six pages: Research Panels and Research Special Sessions. They are the mostly curated part of the research program. Nobody submits a manuscript to get in. Somebody has an idea for 90 or 120 minutes, convinces a handful of people to stand behind it, and sends it in.

This year the two calls have changed hands. Farinaz Koushanfar of UC San Diego, who assembled the six research panels of DAC 2026 as Panel Chair, now chairs the Research Special Sessions. I take over the research panels from her, after chairing the Engineering Tracks program in Long Beach.

So before you decide whether to spend an evening on a proposal, it is worth stepping back and asking two questions. Why do we gather for DAC in the first place? And which of the two formats fits the idea you have been carrying around since July?

Why We Gather: What Long Beach Told Us

Two weeks before Long Beach I wrote that DAC's reason for existence is simple. It is the annual gathering where the methods, tools and flows that enable chips and systems are debated, published and demonstrated. Chips are designed by methodology, and methodology advances in public.

Then 5,059 people tested the claim. That is the total registration DAC reported on August 21, labeled preliminary: 2,630 Full Conference and Engineering Track passes, 1,594 I LOVE DAC passes and 835 exhibitor booth staff. General Chair Renu Mehra said Long Beach "exceeded expectations for a first-time location." For a conference that took 63 years to get there, I will take that sentence.

So why do that many people travel when every paper ends up online? In July I described DAC as three tenses. The floor shows what is being sold. The Engineering Track shows what already worked. The research program shows what is still an open question.

Inside that research program, two formats exist for the things a refereed paper cannot do. A paper answers a question its authors chose. A panel puts one question to people who did not choose each other's answers. A special session lines up results that nobody has yet put side by side. In Long Beach, one room held all six research panels and another held all eight research special sessions. Two rooms, fourteen arguments, three days.

Those fourteen slots are the part of the program you can still shape this week.

The Map, by Format

Before Long Beach I sorted DAC by pass. This time the sorting is by format, because the two calls sound alike and ask for different things.

	Research Panel	Research Special Session
The idea	One high-level question, and people who answer it differently	One timely theme, covered by a set of talks
On stage	A moderator and panelists	A chair and invited speakers
Length	90	90 or 120 minutes
What you write	An abstract of up to 1,000 words, the audience, and the controversy	A session abstract of up to 300 words, plus a title and 150-word abstract per talk
People	A named moderator and named panelists, each with a bio and a viewpoint	A confirmed chair and confirmed speakers, the chair from a different organization than every speaker
What stays afterward	No manuscript; the record is whatever people write up	An optional invited paper per talk or per session, up to four pages plus references
Chair for 2027	Me, Frank Schirrmeister, Synopsys	Farinaz Koushanfar, UC San Diego
Proposals due	November 18, 2026	November 18, 2026

The panel call says a good panel explores a single high-level question with differing viewpoints, and that controversy is encouraged. The form has a field for it. The special session call offers three structures instead: a run of 30-minute talks, a mini-tutorial followed by talks on different approaches, or talks followed by a short panel moderated by the chair.

My shorthand from July still holds. A panel is the argument. A special session is the evidence.

Same Topic, Two Rooms

The clearest way to see the difference is to watch one topic go through both formats. Long Beach did that three times.

Photonics, a day apart. On Tuesday afternoon, the panel "Who Holds the Upper Hand: Electrical or Photonic Links in Scaled-out Chiplet Systems?" put a contest in its title. Umit Ogras moderated, with Subramanian Iyer of UCLA, Darius Bunandar of Lightmatter, Volker Sorger of the University of Florida and Syrus Ziai of Eliyan. The abstract grants each side its strengths: bandwidth and energy efficiency over distance for photonics, maturity and cost for electrical links. Then it asks which one holds as systems scale to hundreds or thousands of tiles.

On Wednesday afternoon, the special session "Weaving the Photonic Fabric: Electronic-Photonic Design Automation for Chiplet AI Systems", chaired by Bill Lin of UC San Diego, did not ask whether. It asked how. A talk from Lightmatter covered co-simulation of co-packaged optics. Jiaqi Gu of Arizona State University presented an open-source physical design flow that, per the abstract, takes a netlist to a fabrication-ready layout within an hour. David Harame of AIM Photonics covered heterogeneous integration and 3D packaging. One room argued the choice. The other showed the tooling.

Quantum. On Wednesday morning, the panel "Bridging Quantum, AI, and EDA: The Next Frontier of Design Automation", moderated by Joseph Bardin, looked a decade out at how quantum simulation and AI could change design automation. Next door, "Quantum Stack Attack: Building the Machine", chaired by Siyuan Niu, ran four talks on the machine as it exists, from analog simulation on Google's Willow processor to an open-source control system. You had to pick one: the outlook, or the hardware.

Verification, two hours apart. In my July piece on the full pass I called Monday the upgrade in miniature. "Who Verifies the Verifier?" ran at 1:30 in one room, and "LLMs for Silicon" at 3:30 in the other. It is also the pairing whose afterlife I can document best, and I will come back to it in a future post.

How to Choose Your Format

If you have one question and can name people who will answer it differently, it is a panel, and it comes to me as panels chair. The form wants a title, an abstract, the intended audience, the controversy, and a moderator and panelists by name, each with a bio and a viewpoint. The strongest proposals name people who have already said yes, and say where each of them stands. Together with a team of content chairs, we work with accepted proposers to finalize the panel, and the Executive Committee approves the result. If a similar panel ran recently, say why the question deserves 2027.

If you have a theme and three or four people whose results add up to more than their separate papers, it is a special session, and it goes to Farinaz. That form asks for a little more homework on people. Line up your chair and speakers before you submit, and list every co-author up front, because the author list stays as submitted once a session is accepted. A few emails usually cover it. In return, the format is more generous about what you leave behind, because each talk can become an invited paper.

If you have both, photonics and quantum showed in Long Beach that a topic can carry a panel and a special session in the same week.

And if your panel or special session is about practical engineering rather than research, it belongs in the Engineering Track Special Sessions, where proposals are due Jan 11, 2027. Business-focused panels go to the DAC Pavilion.

Both research calls close Nov 18, 2026. Accept and reject notifications go out March 8, 2027.

See You in San Jose

DAC 2027 runs July 11 to 14 at the San Jose Convention Center. The research papers that will fill most of its rooms are being finished this week by people who are not sleeping much. The panels and special sessions are still open, and they ask for far less.

The panel form asks for a question, a few names and a disagreement. Anyone who stood in a Long Beach coffee line already has all three. The special session form asks for a theme and colleagues willing to commit, which takes a few phone calls. I would make them today.

I look forward to reading what you send. See you in San Jose.