Editorial: January 4, 1996
Welcome to EDN’s first issue of 1996. Now is a good time to take a sober look at your skills set and weigh it against the demands of the coming year. Are you ready for the technological mountain climbing you’ll need to do this year? To help you, EDN will be offering you much more than its usual 26 issues and editorial supplements. This year, we’re co-sponsoring three conferences and seminars on key technical topics. I’ll bet that at least one of them will apply to your design work in 1996.
For the second year, EDN and Hewlett-Packard are co-sponsoring the High-Performance Design track of Design SuperCon. This eclectic technical event combines papers and demos with the same sort of practical design insight you expect from EDN’s articles. Papers will focus on the latest design techniques for high-performance systems. For the purposes of this conference, high-performance systems run at clock rates of more than 50 MHz, have wide and fast buses, and process signals in the hundreds of megahertz.
Design SuperCon paper authors are from the industry, and their presentations are directed precisely to your need for practical, usable design information. This year, Margery Conner is coordinating the Design SuperCon papers. Longtime EDN readers will recognize Margery’s name- - she’s a former EDN technical editor. Last year, more than 90% of Design SuperCon attendees said they’d return to the the conference. That’s a very high approval rating in anyone’s book.
Design SuperCon will be held Jan 30 to Feb 1 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA, so it’s not too late to register if you hurry. For registration information, call (800) 222-8734 or (214) 245-8781.
Recognizing the increasing use of signal processing in systems design, EDN is again co-sponsoring DSPx, the signal processing applications conference and exposition. In its early years, DSPx focused exclusively on digital signal processing, but even DSP systems have some amount of analog signal processing on the front and back ends. Consequently, you’ll find coverage of analog signal-processing topics, in addition to the industry’s best DSP conference.
This is an extensive conference, where more than 150 papers from the industry will be presented on all forms of signal processing including audio/voice/speech, video and imaging, communications, and instrumentation. I’ll be conducting a new-products introductory session at the conference, where you’ll see quick thumbnail sketches of the latest signal-processing products. You’ll also find information on core signal-processing technologies, including digital signal processors, analog and power ICs, ASIC design, A/D and D/A converters, and EDA tools for signal-processing systems design. Jim Williams from Linear Technology is the keynote speaker. He plans to look at DSP from an analog designer’s viewpoint. Now that’s mixed-signal design!
DSPx will be held March 11 to 14 at the San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, CA. For registration information, call (203) 840-5652.
Those of you working with- - or considering- - the PCI bus must attend the PCI Spring Developers Conference and Exposition. EDN is co-sponsoring this event with Annabooks and PC2. This is the be-all and end-all of PCI conferences. The conference begins on April 29, with a full slate of tutorials. The tutorials continue on May 2 and 3. The conference sessions are on April 30 and May 1. For those of you who enjoyed my hands-on PCI article (EDN, Oct 26, 1995), the PCI Project Dream Team will conduct a panel session at PCI Spring on May 1.
PCI Spring will be held at the Red Lion Inn in San Jose, CA. For more information, call (800) 462-1042 or (619) 673-0870
Steven H. Leibson
Editor in Chief