ASP DAC 2009

• ASP DAC attendance was within reason. The conference was energetic and technically excellent.
  
  FIRST KEYNOTE: MITSUO SAITO, TOSHIBA
  
  The Start-up activity in EDA is still strong. EDA as a whole is not consolidating but there is consolidation going on in some segments of the EDA market.
  
  Taking Toshiba’s design projects as an example, Saito-san showed how electronic design was evolved from the past, and predicted that “co-design of dedicated hardware and software” is the future of design in 2017. In the meantime, power consumption will continue to be an issue for the next decade.
  
  ESL METHODOLOGY PANEL
  
  The fewer number of hardware vendors will also decrease the hardware variety, but software design cost may lower as well. In the future, if software design cost keeps increasing, it may not be able to support many platforms, and the software design will be free from standardization.
  
  The thing that stood out was ARM’s hold on SoC designs
  
  3RD KEYNOTE: LEON STOK, IBM
  
  Model-based DFM didn’t take off because of the complexity and the amount of time it consumed.
  
  Prescriptive Design Rules (PDR) tell you what you can do rather that RDRs that tell you what not to do (prohibitive). PDRs are a set of design rules that tell you what’s allowed, and also have a set of prescribed patterns that allow layout configurations. The results of PDR are predictable layout constructs with predictable yield and circuit performance.
  
  Emersion Lithography also allowed you to cut down on DFM tools. At 32nm the main effort is to tune your lithography to your allowed features.
  
• 32nm is too small for the old 65nm double via rules.
  
  At 32nm extraction models need rewriting. PDR cuts down on the number of models that need to be written (but requires very clear cell boundaries).
  
  Nancy Wu & Gary Smith