Nurturing more user participation at DAC: the management is on it

It’s no secret that the Design Automation Conference has been evolving. Seen from the negative side, one might point to a smaller show, and less participation from certain major EDA companies. Seen on the positive side, one could equally point to greater emphasis on the demo suites and the technical program, and less emphasis on the trade-show aspects of the event.

Clearly the DAC producers are moving with the times. This year they have added an entirely new technical track, the User Track, to the event. The bulk of technical tracks at DAC tend to be dominated by vendors offering how-to-do-it presentations, best practices, lessons learned and the like. In the worst case, vendors simply dispatch a product marketing guy to give a sales pitch, despite the technical committees’ best attempts to prevent this.

But the User Track is intended to be different. According to the DAC folks, the point of this track is to put real users—the ones not affiliated with a particular vendor–in front of their peers, offering papers on, to quote, "the use of EDA tools to design a novel electronic system, or the integration of EDA tools within a design flow or methodology to produce such systems." This could be a really great opportunity to hear from real designers and methodologists how they are actually using the tools, instead of hearing from vendors how they "should" work in principle. If this sounds interesting, the call for papers lays out the guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 19 December, so you have plenty of time to look into it.

Speaking of deadlines, the other place at DAC where you are likely to hear really candid comments from the people who are really doing this stuff is in the tutorials, panels, and special sessions. The DAC folks have just announced an extension of the proposal deadlines for these three categories of events, to 28 November, 1700 Mountain Time. So once again, you have a chance to get together a proposal that underwrites what DAC is really all about: engineers talking to engineers.

Well don’t just sit there …