June Conferences: DAC and Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits

Before we know it, it will be summer and that means conferences. First there is the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco from June 3 until June 7 and then if you need to be warmed up after the cold San Francisco fog, you can head out to Honolulu for the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, which runs from June 12 through the 15. What you do in between is totally up to you.

Design Automation Conference DAC has three keynotes this year. The first is “Scaling for 2020 Solutions” to be given my Mike Muller of ARM. He will be looking at how far we have come, the advances in EDA and business models and then speculate on the needs for scaling designs for 2020. We will then get to see state-of-the art design through the eyes of Joshua Friedrich of IBM and Brad Heaney of Intel, who will talk about “designing High Performance Systems-on-Chip.” Finally C. L. Liu from National Tsing Hua University will talk about “My First Design Automation Conference - 1982″

As usual, the DAC program is crammed packed with sessions, panels, exhibits, management day, executive day, workshops, collocated meetings, tutorial, and, of course, presentations. I will be talking about these more extensively in the next few weeks in the EDA Designline.

Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits The Symposium is actually two overlapping events, one on technology and the other on circuits.  This is done to provide the opportunity for technologists and circuit/system designers to interact and attend presentations by each other in an open forum. In addition they will be holding joint technology and circuit focus sessions this year.

Plenary Sessions

The Symposium on VLSI Technology will open with two invited plenary talks. First, Mike Mayberry of Intel will share his view through the “fog” of CMOS technology scaling, and identify directions for novel switching devices and new methods for computation. Then, Prof. Ichiro Yamada of the University of Tokyo will describe how advances in information and communication technologies and micro-electro-mechanical devices (MEMS) can be leveraged to address the rapidly growing issues of the aging population and lifestyle-related diseases.

The Symposium on VLSI Circuits will open with two invited plenary talks. “The Evolution of Next Generation Data Center Networks for High Capacity Computing” will be given by Nicholas Ilyadis, Vice President and CTO of the Infrastructure and Networking Group at Broadcom. He will discuss the challenges of modern cloud computing and how they can be resolved by redefined network topologies and their underlying technologies and silicon solutions. The second plenary talk, “Technology Innovations for Smart Cities,” will be given by Akira Maeda, Chief Technology Officer, Infrastructure Systems Company, Hitachi, Ltd. He will discuss the technology innovations needed to realize “smart” cities, with emphasis on applications such as sensing, highly parallel processing, and mobile broadband communication for sophisticated social infrastructure systems.

“This year’s VLSI Technology program will highlight breakthroughs in the evolution of CMOS scaling technology and new 3D memory structures as the semiconductor industry begins to move devices to the 22 nm node for volume production,” said Ming-Ren Lin of Globalfoundries, General Chair of the 2012 Symposium on VLSI Technology.

“The VLSI Circuits program will present major advancements in such diverse application areas as intelligent automotive vision systems and medical electronics, as well as more universal topics such as energy-efficient electronics and wireless communications interfaces,” said Ajith Amerasekera of Texas Instruments, General Chair of the 2012 Symposium on VLSI Circuits.

More information can be found here.