Embedded Systems Design takes center stage at 38th Design Automation Conference

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS DESIGN TAKES CENTER STAGE
AT 38TH DESIGN AUTOMATION CONFERENCE

Design Industry's Leading Trade Show Reinforces Strong, Diverse Technical Program

BOULDER, Colo. - April 2, 2001 - The Design Automation Conference (DAC) today announced an expansive technical program for its 38th annual event, which will be held June 18-22 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This year?s conference maintains the varied and robust technical offerings of previous years while featuring a heavier focus on embedded systems design.

"System-on-a-chip (SoC) design is rapidly becoming a dominant area of the design automation industry," said Jan Rabaey, 38th DAC general chair and professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. "The 38th DAC is dedicating a significant share of its program to this area while still maintaining a wide and diverse technical offering in all aspects of the design industry."

More than 17,000 participants are expected to attend this year?s conference, which will again feature world-renowned keynote speakers, more than 250 exhibiting companies, demo suites, over 160 papers, panels, sessions and tutorials, and the highly popular Interoperability and Women in EDA Workshops.

Embedded Systems Design Highlights

More than 35 papers and panels will cover various areas of embedded systems design, including embedded compilation, hardware/software co-design, system modeling and power optimization. Among the highlighted topics are system-level configurability, an analysis of the Bluetooth Standard, memory optimization techniques in digital signal processing, applications of static scheduling in real-time embedded systems, application-specific customization for SoC designs, compiler and architecture interactions, and scheduling techniques for power management.

A plenary panel of leading scholars and industry executives will talk about embedded software design challenges, platform-based design methodologies and issues associated with the automotive, cellular and consumer electronics markets now dependent upon embedded systems. The session, entitled "Embedded System Design: The Real Story," will be held Wednesday, June 20 from 10:30 a.m. - noon.

The DAC exhibit floor will feature an Embedded Systems Showcase that will highlight the latest tools and methodologies for automating the design of embedded systems and components. The Showcase will offer a forum for vendors and designers to exchange ideas, opinions and new discoveries of tools and methodologies for the design of embedded systems, embedded software cores, intellectual property, real-time operating systems, compilers, middleware, and other components.

Technical Program Highlights

Additional sessions will focus on areas such as supply chain management (session 1), verification (sessions 4, 40 and 48), hardware description languages (session 6), IP integration (session 11), logic synthesis (session 24), and analog and mixed-signal design (session 26).

Nine special sessions are designated within the technical program that feature invited presentations by leading scholars and engineers. The topics cover "Nanometer Futures" (session 2), "Design for Subwavelength Manufacturability: Impact on EDA" (session 7), "Configurable Computing: Reconfiguring the Industry" (session 12), "Verification: Life Beyond Algorithms" (session 16), "Dissecting an Embedded System: Lessons from Bluetooth (session 17), "Inductance 101 and Beyond" (session 22), "Closing the Gap between ASIC and Custom: Design Examples" (session 27), "Visualization and Animation for VLSI Design" (session 31), and "On-chip Communication Architectures" (session 41).

Technical Papers

Technical papers to be presented at this year?s DAC include topics covering system-level design, synthesis, physical design, verification interconnect, power, and IP issues. Five Best Paper Awards of $1,000 each will be announced at the General Session on June 19, in the following categories:

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Henry Samueli, co-chairman and chief technical officer of Broadcom Corporation, will deliver the opening keynote address on Tuesday, June 19, entitled "Designing in the New Millennium, It?s Even Harder Than We Thought." Dr. Samueli will speak to the challenges facing the design community in the development of very complex systems on chips and why the development of a comprehensive EDA strategy can be the key to achieving rapid time-to-market. Dr. Samueli has over 20 years experience in the fields of digital signal processing and communications system engineering and has published more than 100 technical papers on broadband communications circuits.

On Thursday, June 21, Willem P. "Wim" Roelandts, president and chief executive officer of Xilinx, Inc., will give the second keynote address on the proliferation of FPGAs as integral components of all digital electronic products within the next decade. Roelandts, who spent nearly 30 years at Hewlett-Packard before joining Xilinx in 1996, will give his outlook in a speech entitled, "FPGAs Enter the Mainstream." Roelandts currently serves on the board of directors of the Semiconductor Industry Association and the Technology Network and is president of the Fabless Semiconductor Association.

Workshops

The Workshop for Women in Design Automation, entitled "Smart Risk Taking = Innovation," will take place on Sunday, June 17 from 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. Prominent EDA industry leaders will discuss their own strategies for establishing workplace environments that encourage and reward smart risk taking to improve product development and promote success. Lynn LeBlanc, senior vice president of customer advocacy at Cadence Design Systems, will give the keynote address, and the recipient of the second annual Marie R. Pistilli Women in EDA Achievement Award will be honored at the Workshop.

The Interoperability Workshop returns this year, also on Sunday, June 17, from noon - 5:00 p.m. Leading engineers from top design companies will discuss how the EDA industry can keep pace with the rapid advancement of semiconductor technology through development of a standard application programming interface (API) for sharing design information.

Full-Day Tutorials

Six full-day tutorials will be held on Friday, June 22, on the following topics:

Registration

To register for DAC, visit www.dac.com or call 1-800-321-4573 in the USA to request registration materials. The advanced registration deadline is May 21, 2001.

About DAC

DAC is the premier forum for the electronic design industry to exchange information on products, methodologies, and processes. Attended by more than 17,000 developers, designers, researchers, managers, and engineers from leading electronics companies and universities around the world, DAC includes more than 260 exhibitors and offers a robust technical program covering the electronics industry?s hottest trends.

The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery/Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Circuits and Systems Society (IEEE/CAS) and the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDA Consortium). For more information, including registration, visit the DAC Web site at www.dac.com, or contact DAC management at 1-800-321-4573.

For more information, contact: