ESD Alliance to describe system shift at DVCon Europe

Electronic System Design Alliance executive director Bob Smith is to be be the keynote speaker during the DVCon Europe gala dinner.

Smith’s dinner presentation, “Moore’s Law and the Transition from Chip-Centric Design to System-Level Design”, will be held Wednesday, October 19, at the Holiday Inn Munich City Center, in Munich, Germany, where DVCon Europe will take place October 19-20.

In his keynote speech, Smith will offer a perspective on how the semiconductor design ecosystem is evolving from a chip-centric focus to a system-centric worldview. According to the ESD Alliance’s analysis, although SoCs and other complex semiconductor devices remain critical building blocks, the design emphasis is shifting to system design. The industry is beginning a transition from integration at the transistor level to integration at the functional or block level.

Smith will explain how the ESD Alliance has altered its focus to recognize the breadth of activity across the entire design ecosystem and affect changes throughout the semiconductor industry.

As executive director of the ESD Alliance, formerly the EDA Consortium, Smith is responsible for the management and operations of the organization. Smith began his career in high tech as an analog design engineer working at Hewlett Packard. Since then, he has spent more than 30 years in various roles in marketing, business development and executive management primarily working with startup and early stage companies. These companies include IKOS Systems, Synopsys, LogicVision, and Magma Design Automation. He was a member of the IPO teams that took Synopsys public in 1992 and Magma public in 2001.

Smith received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Davis and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.