Gary Smith EDA Consulting in Electronic Design

Gary Smith EDA (GSEDA) is the leading provider of market intelligence and advisory services for the global Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Electronic System Level (ESL) design, and related technology markets.

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DAC 2010 – The Turn-a-Round DAC

DAC 2010 – The Turn-a-Round DAC

It was a Great DAC!

For five years now we have been trying to get the right mix of Exhibits, Panels, Technical Sessions and attendees to match the demographics of the emerging Electronic System Design market. At every inflection point DAC has had to reinvent itself to match the concerns of the design engineer as they move from one methodology to the new prevailing methodology. DAC originally started out as a PCB Design conference. It then followed the engineering community into the Gate Level Design era. After that came the switch to RTL and now we have made the switch to ESL design. That doesn’t mean we’re leaving the rest behind, although we could do with a little more PCB representation.

The attendance seemed lighter than normal, but Springsoft and many other vendors reported record attendance at their demos. What surprised me was that even the small, out-of-the-way ESL vendors’ booths were packed. All reported a high Embedded Software interest, especially in many-core, parallel computing. Most of my questions this year were on the same topic. If there was a show theme though, it was 3DICs.

Mary Olsson started out DAC with her GSEDA Sunday night presentation on 3DICs. There were more sessions on 3D during DAC. As of now 3D looks like the most promising technology to replace CMOS as the Moore’s Law driver in 2020.

This year they cut the show floor down to three days, however those of us that left early missed Peggy Aycinena’s session on “Enabling Tomorrow’s Complex SoCs” and a great keynote by Gadi Singer of Intel. I won’t make that mistake next year.

The electric cart experiment went great. Not only did the pneumonia not come back but I felt better at the end of the show that I have for years. I had no trouble seeing all of the vendors, where last year I didn’t get through the whole exhibit floor. An added feature was that at the end of Sunday night’s presentations we stuck the leftover WallCharts in the front basket, and as I was cruising through the show I kept being stopped by engineers asking for them. I felt like a paper boy, but we handed out more WallCharts than we ever have. It worked so well I promised Lori Kate I’ll use the cart every year, after I turn 80.