Usability made flesh
As usual, this issue includes our regular preview of the Design Automation Conference (DAC), taking place this year in Anaheim, California (June 13-18). However, given this journal’s particular focus on practical design information, I wanted to highlight one DAC strand up front. Indeed, given that the event has taken more than its share of criticism over the years, it’s also good to be able to push one of its recent positive moves into the foreground.
As usual, this issue includes our regular preview of the Design Automation Conference (DAC), taking place this year in Anaheim, California (June 13-18). However, given this journal’s particular focus on practical design information, I wanted to highlight one DAC strand up front. Indeed, given that the event has taken more than its share of criticism over the years, it’s also good to be able to push one of its recent positive moves into the foreground.
The User Track has been expanded to become a genuine source of ‘war stories’—presentations by designers for designers about real-world experiences. Running Tuesday through Thursday (June 15-17), it includes eight sessions, three poster sessions and one panel. The contents traverse all the most challenging topics facing EDA and its users: DFM, timing, power, ESL, variability and more.
Last year’s inaugural track had 42 actual presentations and that number has risen slightly but significantly in 2010 to 48. Companies laying bare their triumphs and—one hopes—the occasional near-tragedy include IBM, Oracle, Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor, AMD, Toshiba and Intel.
Talking to attendees during sessions at last year’s User Track in San Francisco, it was hard not to notice the firmly positive response this initiative drew. Certainly, it does seem to have helped cure a perceived disconnect between the tool usage that was seen as the primary focus of the DAC show and the tool development that was seen as the heart of the conference.
By highlighting very specific concerns shared by designers throughout our business, the User Track really does open a necessary dialogue among engineers. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that virtually nobody can entirely ‘go it alone’ given today’s levels of design complexity. All opportunities for productive cooperation should not merely be welcomed but actively embraced—that’s a posh way of saying that as many of you as feasibly (and economically) can should try and catch at least some of the User Track’s papers.
In that regard, the two co-chairs, Tufts University’s Soha Hassoun (returning for a second round) and Magma’s Patrick Groeneveld, are already due some kudos and plaudits, as are the 27 other committee members who have helped them to assemble this year’s menu.
Of course, this also gives me the opportunity to say that EDA Tech Forum will have its own presence at DAC, alongside our sister RTC Group titles at Booth 1263. Feel free to drop by or email me during the show—pauld@rtcgroup.com.
As ever, many thanks for reading, and can I wish everyone a productive and profitable DAC 2010.
