The best technical conferences are planned with an eye on real-life design challenges. With embedded systems foremost in the minds of legions of design engineers, the 39th Design Automation Conference (DAC, June 10-14, New Orleans) takes its cues from embedded electronics, which pervade almost every aspect of our daily lives.
At this year's DAC, some 15,000 attendees will hear presentations of over 160 technical papers. The second annual Embedded Systems Showcase offers exhibitors and attendees a highly focused area to display and view tools for the design of embedded systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). Over 225 EDA, silicon, embedded software, and hardware vendors will be on hand.
In addition to the embedded-systems emphasis in the technical program, a track called Design Methods Sessions covers a wide range of methodology-oriented topics. Many sessions also are geared toward embedded-system design.
DAC's program committee has revamped its Monday schedule, making June 10 a don't-miss day. Among the events are a full-day tutorial on issues and problems related to embedded-system software design. A morning-long hands-on tutorial covers development of bus-functional models for embedded ATM switch verification, while an afternoon hands-on session tackles the creation and use of virtual prototypes for embedded-system verification.
This year's hands-on tutorials are a new feature to the conference. The in-depth, interactive sessions will allow participants to work with the tools. Sessions address many embedded-systems design challenges, from system verification and assertion-based validation, to hardware/software integration and virtual prototyping. In keeping with DAC's embedded-systems focus, the theme of the hands-on tutorials is "Verifying Embedded Systems."
Tutorials in general are a big focus this year at DAC. Five will take place on Friday, June 15, with topics ranging from intellectual property (IP) design and integration for SoCs, modeling technology for high-frequency design, using System C for high-level modeling and design, best practice for physical chip implementation, and new computing platforms for embedded systems.
The opening session and keynote will be delivered on Tuesday, June 11 by Hajime Sasaki, chairman at NEC Corp. Sasaki will outline a paradigm shift in which the design process itself has become the key to the semiconductor industry's future success. He'll address the changes necessary to the traditional design hierarchy and the need for a revolution in functional design.
A second keynote address comes from Jerry Fiddler, chairman of Wind River Systems, on the afternoon of Thursday, June 13. Fiddler's topic is the melding of the traditionally distinct realms of embedded software, silicon manufacturing, and electronic design automation. Despite earlier failed efforts to bring these disparate worlds into harmony, Fiddler contends that now is the time to bridge the gaps.
Workshops are a continuing tradition at DAC as well. The fifth annual "Workshop for Women in Design Automation," a full-day interactive seminar focused on career advancement for women in the electronics industry, will be held Monday, June 10. Chris King, AMI Semiconductor's CEO, will give a keynote address.
A second Monday workshop of interest is the Interoperability Workshop. There, two panels will discuss both tool users' and the industry's views of progress in tool interoperability and what the future may hold. Since last year's DAC, the OpenAccess Coalition has made strides toward establishing an open and standard application programming interface (API). This workshop offers attendees a chance to learn more about its prospects for success.
Among the many sessions of interest to embedded designers, a few stand out. First up in the Design Methods track is Session 3, "Design Innovations for Embedded Processors." It details a number of innovations surrounding the design of these now-ubiquitous processors, including a technique for mixing compiled-code and interpreted-code approaches to instruction-set simulation.
Panel sessions are always interesting at DAC, and Session 31 comprises a panel that should draw a sizable crowd. Titled "Unified Tools for SoC Embedded Systems: Mission Critical, Mission Impossible, Or Mission Irrelevant," the panel's chair, Gary Smith of Gartner Dataquest, will lead a group of experts through a discussion that picks up where Gerry Fiddler's keynote address leaves off. Is hardware-software co-design feasible for embedded systems, and is it even desirable?
For the many designers interested in the challenges of timing analysis and memory optimization for embedded systems, Session 40 is a must. It will introduce techniques such as a "schedulability" analysis algorithm for real-time systems.
Of course, not all DAC attendees have embedded-system design uppermost in their minds. Behavioral synthesis is a controversial topic that holds the promise of improved productivity for SoC designers. Session 55 will cover some of the latest advances in this technology, including how to bridge the gap between behavioral synthesis and processor design using state-of-the-art synthesis techniques.
Analog modeling will be addressed in Session 35, which tackles a number of subjects, including a high-level behavioral model of coupled oscillators. This paper, incidentally, is a candidate for DAC's annual Best Paper award. Another presentation in this session explores the application of formal verification to analog models, while a third discusses techniques for analyzing unsolvable systems that can be constructed using the VHDL-AMS hardware description language.
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