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Having lived in Los Gatos for years there was always a great temptation to take the southbound entrance onto highway 17 rather than the northbound entrance, which lead to work. The southbound entrance would take me over-the-hill to Santa Cruz then on to Monterey. This temptation was especially strong in the spring.

Fortunately I found a solution to my problem in the Electronic Design Symposium (EDPS). First of all this is a conference started by Design Methodologist for engineers – no marketing hype allowed. As a retired Design Methodologist it’s my kind of conference. Second it is in the Monterey Beach Hotel right on the beach. We generally, as we will this year, have our Thursday night dinner at the Yacht Club. Not bad; I now have a reason to make my first over-the-hill trip of the year, get my walk on the beach and my first Sand Dabs dinner. All this and two days of actively discussing this year’s leading topics in semiconductor and system design. This is definitely a cutting edge symposium and the audience is as much a part of the presentation as the presenters are.

SoCs and FPGAs and the Top 5 EDA problems

Picking the highlights of the conference are, as usual, difficult but I’ll try. We start off the conference with a Keynote on Programmable solutions; the new world of SoCs implemented on a FPGA. This will be followed by the first session, the Top 5 EDA Problems, with speakers from Broadcom, Cadence, AMD and Synopsys. Two users and two EDA vendors should make a well balanced session.

EDA in the Cloud

Session two is EDA in the Cloud, a follow on to last year’s highly successful talk on the Cloud. This year we decided to make it an entire session. Two talks by Intel and talks by Nimbic and Xuropa, the two leading Cloud providers for the technical community should make it very interesting. Low Power with Performance: server, software, ASIPs and Jim Hogan

My session is the last session on Thursday, Low Power with Performance. I give the first talk giving the details of my development of a Low Power model for Mobile SoCs. The results of this nine month process will shed new light on the Mobile SoC design problem. That will be followed by Ian Ferguson, who is leading ARM into the server market. That should draw a lot of Intel attendees. Qi Wang, Cadences expert on Low Power design tools follows Ian and the Grant Martin closes up the session with a talk on Low Power Software and ASIPs. We will end up the day at the Yacht Club enjoying Jim Hogan’s Keynote the Next Horizon.

3DICs

Friday April 6th opens up with a keynote by Riko Radojcic, of Qualcomm, on the Roadmap for 3D-ICs. Then we go into two full sessions on 3D-ICs. This is a follow up on Herb Reiter’s highly successful session at EDP 2011.

So if you have an urge to drive over the hill on April 5th, and you want to be involved in some lively discussions (arguments?) on some very important topics, sign up for EDP 2012. You won’t regret it.
http://www.eda.org/edps