There are thousands of good reasons to go to DAC this year. I'll give you seven in this blog post. But one of those reasons towers over all the others. Literally, at 6' 6" tall. Opening Keynote: Joe Costello The opening keynote is being given by Joe Costello. He was CEO of Cadence from its creation as the merger of SDA and ECAD, up until 1997, over a decade, during the years that it went from a startup to the largest company in the EDA industry. Plus he was at SDA for a couple of years before that. In 2006, a decade after quitting Cadence, he gave a keynote at DAC which was far and away the best DAC keynote that I've ever seen. I won't go over all the details. If you are interested, I managed to find a video of it so you can watch the whole thing. But he was giving his three rules for building a business. If you don't have a little over an hour to watch the whole video then here are the three rules, but they won't make much sense as simple bullet points: Think like a fish (basically, know what your customers want) Write the press release first (it will never get better than that) He ran out of time, but made a follow up video, in which he revealed the third rule was "change the rules" (this is a rule, so I guess sticking to the rules would be changing the rules...my head hurts) One of the most memorable moments of any keynote I've seen anywhere, was when Joe illustrated "think like a fish" by lying down on the stage and pretending to be a fish. Not only the audience was surprised, so was the cameraman. It was like one of those moments in a football game where the cameraman, and not just the defense, think the ball is somewhere else. Joe is now the CEO of Enlightened. They are an IoT startup in the lighting area. The business model, as I understand it, is that they go to a company and replace all their lights with smart lights. They don't charge the company anything for this. They get paid by a percentage of the power savings that result. In our business, it is equivalent to licensing some IP for free and only collecting a royalty. Smart lighting is one of the possible security holes (see my post What Keeps MGM's Head of Security Up at Night? Lightbulbs! ) but is also a major use of electricity in companies that don't have power-hungry manufacturing...nor datacenters. Joe's keynote is titled IoT: Tales from the Front Line . He will be on from 9:15am to 10:00am on Monday, but don't be surprised if he overruns and everyone is too spellbound to stop him. Here's the video I promised, the whole of Joe's 2006 keynote: (Please visit the site to view this video) Three More Keynotes There are three other keynotes. On Tuesday, it is Chuck Grindstaff, who is executive chairman of Siemens PLM Software in Texas. PLM stands for product lifecycle management. His keynote is titled The Rise of the Digital Twin . He will be talking about what is commonplace in IC design, but revolutionary in most spaces, of building a simulated version of the product in parallel with developing the real one. Since Siemens just finished acquiring Mentor, I hope he will say something interesting on that topic, too. Many products contain boards, wiring harnesses, SoCs, and embedded software, all areas that Mentor brings to Siemens. On Wednesday, the keynote is by Tyson Tuttle, CEO of Silicon Labs, which is a local fabless semiconductor company based in Austin. He will talk on Accelerating the IoT , addressing engineering challenges of adding connectivity to electronic devices, including cost, ease of use, energy efficiency, interoperability, future extensibility, and security. On Thursday, the keynote is traditionally by someone from academia. This year it is Rosalin Picard of MIT, who will talk about Emotion Technology, Wearables, and Surprises . She says she will talk about: New insights about the "true smile of happiness," discovering new ways cameras (and your smartphone, even in your handbag) can compute your bio-signals without using any new sensors, finding electrical signals on the wrist that reveal insight into deep brain activity, and learning surprising implications of wearable sensing for autism, anxiety, sleep, memory, epilepsy, and more. Sky Talks In addition to the keynotes, there will be three "sky talks" (or "skywalks" as the spell corrector on the DAC email decided they should be called). These will take place at the DAC pavilion in the exhibit hall. They are all at 1:00pm to wake you up after your lunch. China is a huge force in semiconductor with plans to invest a number of dollars that grows as fast as the IoT device forecast, but is over $100B. They are the world's biggest importer of semiconductors (although, to be fair, a lot are re-exported). How big? They import more dollar value in semiconductors than oil. Shaojun Wei is a professor from Tsinghua University in Beijing (ranked by most people as #1 in China, unless you happened to go to Beijing University, which is #2). He will talk about all of this under the title China's IC Industry: Today and Tomorrow—Its Influence on Global Design and Design Automation Community . On Tuesday, Simon Segars will be in a discussion with Lucio Lanza about IoT design. I assume you recognize those names, but if not, I have a couple of posts for you: The Design That Made ARM How Lucio Went from Italy to EDA via Intel Finally, on Wednesday, Dinesh Ramanthan, the CEO of NexGen Power Systems of Cupertino (there are apparently other companies in Cupertino). He will talk about Power Electronics with Vertical GaN Devices. In power systems, it is all about "high bandgap devices" which usually means GaN (gallium nitride) or SiC (silicon carbide). NexGen has built devices that can scale up to 4000V and sink 400A of current. That's a bit different from the sub-1V and picoamps that we deal with on leading-edge SoCs. More Information The keynotes and sky talks are open to any attendee, full passes (obviously) but also exhibit passes and exhibitors. The registration page has all the rates, and also allows you to register for free under I love DAC sponsored this year by ClioSoft, OneSpin Solutions, and Truesoft. Full details on the keynotes and skytalks are on the DAC Keynote Page .![]()
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