What do Superman, ASIC and SOC Design, and Newport Beach have in common?

• Do you design ASICs or SOCs?
• Do you work on a team that designs ASICs or SOCs?
• Do you manage a team that designs ASICs or SOCs?

Let me ask you a question then. What’s the one thing you will do from now to the end of the year that will put you or your team ahead of the rampant, cutthroat global competition it will face in 2010? Do you even know?

Let me give you the typical answer, the answer that I know I’d get from most of the engineers, designers, managers, and executives in this industry. It’s a one-word answer. I know it because I’ve heard this answer over and over again. That answer is… nothing.

What!?!?!

Absolutely, positively nothing.

The depressing reality of the SOC design industry is that it has been on cruise control for years. It’s been on incremental improvement for years while increasingly advanced silicon outstrips our ability to exploit it. Here are some of the things I’ve heard over and over again during this decade:

• Just give us tools that are a little better than last year’s.
• I just want to push a button and have all my work done for me.
• I don’t have time to read.
• I don’t go to DAC.
• I don’t go to any shows or conferences because my travel budget’s tight (or gone).

Sound familiar?

Well, you’ve got another chance. Early next month, the Seventh International SOC Conference takes place in Newport Beach. This hidden gem of a conference has been quietly going on under the noses of almost every SOC design team in the world for nearly the entire decade and chances are very good that your competitors have never gone to even one of these conferences. Heck, chances are good that you haven’t either.

Beyond the meeting room doors of this conference, a very few forward-looking people from the industry elite have spent the few bucks needed to drive or take a Southwest Airlines flight to the Orange County/Santa Ana/John Wayne airport, which is almost within walking distance of the inexpensive conference hotel. This is one SOC design conference where it’s easy to convince your boss that you’re not on a junket. One look at a photo of the hotel will be all it takes.

There’s not a design team on the planet right now that’s not frightened and confused, uncertain of what to do, worried, and struggling. What every one of them lack is insight. What they expect, I guess, is to somehow be struck with insight by divine inspiration.

It ain’t coming.

You want inspiration? You have to go out and get it. Aggressively.

In the high-stakes game of chip design, one idea is worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars if it saves you a week or a month of development time. Many millions of dollars if it saves you a respin. Many tens of millions of dollars if your team gets the design win and your competitors don’t.

Can YOU imagine getting that design win, recession be damned? If you can’t, doesn’t that suggest there’s something you don’t know? Something that someone else possibly does know? Something you need to know? Someone with that one idea may well be presenting at the Seventh International SOC Conference. Maybe it’s a new facet to low-power design. Maybe it lies at the intersection of silicon tech and biotech. Maybe it’s not in the head of someone on stage at all but in the head of that person sitting right next to you. Who knows?

One thing’s for sure. You won’t find out sitting in front of your PC’s screen yet another day. If you find it in there, your competition has found it too.

I read a lot of comic books when I was young. Perhaps you too are familiar with the origin legend of Superman. If so, you know he was sent to earth as a child, rushed off the planet Krypton in a one-man rocket, barely in time, before the entire planet exploded. His life saved by his father Jor-El. When he landed on earth, due to the difference in suns, gravity, and atmospheres, little Kal-El had gained superhuman powers.

He was, in fact, an alien from another planet in a distant galaxy.

The analogy is obvious. Our “planet” as we’ve known it (planet SOC) is literally in destruction, endangered by economic forces beyond the control of your design team or anyone else’s. Continuing as you have guarantees pain and suffering. OR YOU CAN CHOOSE TO ROCKET TO A DIFFERENT PLANET IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE NOW. Actually, all it really takes is a flight or drive to Newport Beach in Southern California.

It’s your choice. I dare you to click here.

PS: Either way, it doesn’t matter to me. I’ve no financial interest in this conference. Just an interest in seeing this industry move forward.