ES Design West outreach attracts launch participants

The big idea propelling the launch of ES Design West in July is achieving greater integration across the EDA and IP communities with other parts of the semiconductor supply chain.

It aims to do this by colocation and collaboration with SEMICON West, originally the showcase for chip manufacturing but today already an umbrella for much more of the sector.

Both events will therefore take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, July 9-11, and registration is already open. An increasing number of EDA and IP participants has already signed up to exhibit.

San Francisco’s Moscone Center will host SEMICON West 2019 and the inaugural ES Design West (Naina Ayya)

Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist in the Office of the CTO at exhibitor Ansys, captures why a number of companies have decided to be inaugural participants.

“In addition to the leading classical semiconductor companies, business growth is being driven by the emerging custom-silicon systems companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Automotive Tier Ones and so on,” he says. “By being co-located with SEMICON West, ES Design West will attract attendees from Silicon Valley-based systems companies in all vertical segments, including 5G, high-performance computing, autonomous driving, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and advanced mobile.”

The name of the game is very much outreach, fostering broader collaboration across the supply chain but also reaching out to those companies that might now be looking at silicon systems design (particularly, say, for the Internet of Things, AI or autonomous vehicles) but which have core competences elsewhere.

Thomas Blaesi, vice president of global marketing with Silvaco, sees things in much this way, as he explains his company’s participation at ES Design West. “It is an opportunity to do something new through closer collaboration with designers, device developers, manufacturers and the electronic design system ecosystem,” he says.

In this regard, other ES Design West exhibitors have noted how successful SEMICON events have already been in addressing the wider technology design community.

“It’s important for our EDA industry to make an effort to reach a broader audience,” says Dean Drako, President and CEO of IC Manage. “When I spoke at SEMICON Japan earlier this year, I was impressed by the audience that attended the show. It reinforced my expectation that exhibiting at ES Design West  was a good decision for IC Manage.”

So, there is a sense across a fair slice of the EDA/IP sector that the new conference can expand the client base. We will delve a little more into how that will work over the next few weeks – and we will also take a look at things from the other side: How do the other SEMICON-type exhibitors see the new event helping broaden the industry’s understand to – and response to – the challenges of an increasingly system-oriented era.

Potential ES Design West exhibitors can download a fact sheet about the event.