DAC Highlights - Design & Test of Computers, IEEE

88 0740-7475/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE Copublished by the IEEE CS and the IEEE CASS IEEE Design & Test of Computers WELCOME TO DAC WATCH, a special section commemorating the 40th year of the Design Automation Conference, held 2-6 June 2003 in Anaheim, California. Inside, you will find a perspective on 40 years of DAC from Cadence and Synopsys founder Alberto SangiovanniVincentelli, plus interviews with IEEE Circuits and Systems Society President Giovanni De Micheli, DAC founder Pat Pistilli, and Magma Design Automation Chief Engineer Ron Rohrer. Here, as the technical program cochairs of this year’s DAC, we set the stage with some highlights. The 40th DAC has received a record number of submissions (33% more than last year) for the technical program, which includes 40 sessions, seven special sessions, and eight panels. Design for manufacturing and managing variability are hot topics, as are power distribution and signal integrity for high-speed designs. The conference covers power management and minimization at all levels, from the system level to the multithreshold-gate level, as the “Power emerges as hot topic” sidebar describes. Functional verification is growing in complexity, and this year’s technical program presents new techniques in formal verification and dynamic validation. Analog, mixed-signal, and RF design are also key topics for many companies and research groups. Forward-looking special sessions look at new technologies, and the possible end of classical EDA because of market and technology considerations. Embedded systems continue to challenge the electronics design community, and DAC is responding with sessions on hardware-software codesign and verification. Two special sessions present some of the best papers from the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2003), discussing the design of stateof-the-art microprocessors and SoCs, and solving issues in design convergence and signal integrity. During Tuesday’s plenary session, Sir Robin Saxby, executive chair of ARM Ltd. and this year’s keynote speaker, presents “Less Than 100 nm: A Giant Leap for Mankind?” A follow-up interview (“ARM Twisting: Ask Sir Robin”), co-organized by IEEE Design & Test, focuses on various issues, including the secret of ARM’s success. On Thursday, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli gives another keynote, “The Tides of EDA.” DAC’s eight panels address