DAC #44 - the Pivotal DAC

• This year’s DAC in San Diego was a good conference. With the exception of Free Monday there was little to complain about. The mood of the conference was up; Cadence had a good presence and most of the vendors were happy with the number and quality of their leads. Although the show floor didn’t seem crowded that was primarily caused by the layout and the fact that most people were comparing this year’s show floor to last year’s DAC in San Francisco. Comparing DAC anywhere to a San Francisco DAC is always an apples to oranges proposition. Even the automotive theme worked for many of the vendors.
  
  
  The only disappointment was the lack of software engineers. As most of the vendors on the show floor sell to the IC Designers, the lack of software engineers wasn’t noticed that much. Still there was talk by the ESL vendors, targeting the software problem, of taking another look at the Embedded Systems Conference. That is not a good sign for DAC.
  
  
  In many ways the highlights of the Technical Conference were a panel: Corezilla: Build and Tame the Multicore Beast and a Special Session: Thousand-Core Chips. Both hit at the core (pun intended) of today’s major design problem. Both concentrated on embedded software; in fact when the moderator of the Thousand-Core session tried to get the panel to talk about the hardware design issues the response was, “We know how to put 1,000 cores on a chip; we just don’t know how to program them!” These are the types of sessions needed to attract the software engineers to DAC.
  
  That made me start thinking that we may have a terminology problem. We’ve been talking about embedded software design. Actually the Embedded Systems Conference does an outstanding job of covering that topic. However, as the ESL vendors found out five or six years ago, the standard embedded design is a PC Board design that has a processor, possibly an FPGA and maybe a DSP on the board. That isn’t the problem we are talking about. What we are trying to solve is parallel processing problems; the multi-core, or really multi-processing in general programming problem. Eighty percent of the embedded designers won’t run into that problem. Perhaps the success for the DAC sessions were based on the fact they were named multi-core sessions, not embedded sessions.
  
  
  Hopefully this is the turning point; indicated by the title DAC #44 - the Pivotal DAC. With the Technical Committee’s continued emphasis on the multi-core programming problem and by attracting those vendors addressing the problem we should see the increasing attendance of software engineers and produce DACs that feature the complete solution to today’s SoC design challenge.
  
  
  Gary Smith