DAC attendance, excitement lag Attendance at the Design Automation Conference is slightly down this year from the past few years, and the traffic in the aisles reflected it. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be a lot of excitement around any particular theme or focus.	Richard Goering EDA Software Editor
The figures are now in, and the total number of registered attendees is 5,135, in addition to 3,796 exhibitor attendees. Add in 400 from "other" categories and you get 9,331 people total. What's important is the number of registered attendees, as these are the people who presumably buy EDA tools. The number of registered attendees in San Francisco last year was 7,555; in Anaheim in 2005 was 5,421; and in San Diego in 2004 was 5,825. So we're down a little from all those numbers. "Free Monday" attendance was also down. This year it attracted 1,552 attendees, compared to 3,238 last year. Location is one factor — San Diego will never attract as many people as San Francisco. But various conversations I've had suggest that DAC, as a trade show, may be losing some of its relevance. The big EDA vendors are holding their own user events now, and seem to be getting more mileage for less cost from those events. Notably, the big three EDA vendors didn't roll out any significant product announcements or make much of a splash over anything at this year's DAC. I didn't find much to get excited about at this year's DAC. Some years there's a focus, like design for manufacturability (DFM) or electronic system level (ESL), but not this year. If anything, I would say that functional and power verification was the most active area for new technology, and there were some good announcements there, as noted in our DAC preview. I found fewer startups than usual on my annual search through the aisles for startups I haven't heard of before. DAC has and will continue to have a solid technical program, but unfortunately it almost gets lost amid the trade show and all the glitz that comes with it. If the trade show part of DAC loses some of its luster, and the avalanche of DAC press releases eases up a bit, I certainly wouldn't mind being able to spend more time with the DAC technical program. Magma Design Automation CEO Rajeev Madhavan suggested that DAC should consider combining with the much larger Semicon shows to stay vital. I don't know if Semicon is the right conference, but he may have a point. Posted by Richard Goering on Jun 7, 2007 06:40 PM in EDA Software

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