The yearly Design Automation Conference (DAC) heads into Anaheim, CA, in mid-June for a week of information exchange on everything from management practices and products to methodologies and processes for system and IC design. It's an exhilarating (and exhausting) week and one not to be missed by anyone who needs to stay current about electronics design. And, this year's DAC promises even more than usual.

For example, DAC for the first time has organized an application theme day on Wireless Design to highlight advances in wireless design. This is a series of events on Wednesday, June 15, for engineers working specifically on chip design for wireless communication products and devices.

The day is populated with technical sessions:

• "Information Design Methodology" presents papers on addressing the challenging issues that stem from the complexity of wireless systems together with the resource constraints of area, power and cost.
• "Emerging Directions in Wireless" will identify some major new trends and technologies in wireless and the impact those will have on implementation strategies, architectures, and methodologies for these next generation systems.
• A panel on "Wireless Platforms" offers an opportunity for panelists to debate the various wireless implementation platforms that are breaking new ground, examining issues of efficiency, flexibility and programming models.
• "The Best of Wireless at IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (ISSCC)" will spotlight papers from the 2005 ISSCC conference on wireless designs.

Concurrent with presentations in the technical sessions are activities happening on the exhibit floor. At the DAC Pavilion, there will be presentations with Jan Rabaey of the Berkeley Wireless Center, Mike Muller from ARM and Intel's Gadi Singer. Other events will include an interactive "Wireless Showcase" of the latest in wireless gadgets and a "Wireless Walk" highlighting exhibitors with products related to wireless design.

For those of you who don't know DAC, it is the premier forum for the electronic design industry. It's attended by more than 10,500 developers, designers, researchers, executives, managers and engineers from leading electronics companies and universities worldwide, offering a robust technical program covering the industry's hottest trends.

One of the many unique attractions of the conference is the synergy between the large number of exhibitors demonstrating state-of-the-art products and the technical program, where the fundamental research precursors for these products are presented. More than 237 electronic design automation (EDA), intellectual property (IP) and semiconductor companies will exhibiting their latest products in DAC's distinctive combined booth and private suite format. Fifty-three are first-time DAC exhibitors.

This year, in addition to Wireless Day, DAC has introduced several new events to extend its traditionally strong technical program.

As in the past the technical program is anchored by two keynote addresses. Bernie Meyerson IBM Fellow, Vice President, and Chief Technologist IBM Systems and Technology Group will answer the question: "How Does One Define 'Technology' Now That Classical Scaling Is Dead (and Has Been for Years)?" and Ron Rohrer, Corporate Vice President, Advanced Research and Development, Cadence Design Systems will be showing us how: "Innovation in the EDA Business Need Not Be an Oxymoron."

The technical program, which runs from Tuesday to Thursday, includes 57 regular sessions, nine special sessions and eight panels, with three hot areas in design: System Level Design, Power, and Design for Manufacturability (DFM). as well as the Wireless application focus area.

System Level Design and Verification and embedded systems are hot areas of research, as reflected in the large number of technical papers, tutorials, and panels on these topics.

A special session on Practical ESL experiences is planned, as well as papers on links from high-level synthesis to physical design, optimization in high-level synthesis, architecture specific design tools, and formal verification. With regard to formal verification, there is a panel on the need for verification methodology and not just tools, and a special session on formal verification of large systems. For specification challenges there is a session on the use of MATLAB—the other emerging system design language—with practical flows to ASICs, DSPs, and FPGAs.

In addition to the technical program, two system design related workshops, "UML SoC '05 Workshop" and the "First Integrated Design Systems Workshop" will be held Sunday and Monday.

Embedded systems design is covered in seven sessions including hardware, software, and embedded low-power designs where analysis, optimization, and tradeoffs between performance, energy and fault tolerance will be presented. Systems applications include both communications centric architectures and security.

The second hot topic, power, is a fundamental design issue as reflected in the number of presentations in eight sessions relating to all aspects of power aware design and optimization including leakage, dynamic voltage scaling, tradeoffs and estimation. Power is also a theme in related sessions on synthesis, system-level design, embedded systems and FPGAs. Power is now a performance measure and consequently there is a special session on "Closing the Power gap between ASIC and Custom," a sequel to popular sessions in previous DACs on closing the performance gap.

The third hot area this year is DFM. The currency and urgency of this area is reflected in the large number of submitted papers, panel, and tutorial suggestions that targeted sessions to this topic. The scope of the DFM problem is pervasive, touching on statistical optimization as well as analysis; direct optimization of manufacturability, power and yield impacts of manufacturing variability.

For those of us who want to keep current with in depth exposure to new trends, there are tutorials on both Monday and Friday. Monday offers two tutorials:

• "Statistical Performance Analysis and Optimization of Digital Circuits"
• "C-based Design: Industrial Experience."

On Friday, there are four more tutorials:

• "Constraint Satisfaction Techniques for Automatic Generation of Stimuli for Functional Hardware Verification"
• "Advancements in Energy-Efficient Design"
• "Design for Manufacturing at 65nm and Below"
• "Design of SoC with Embedded Processors."

In addition to the technical focus, this year DAC continues to address business and management issues as part of its broad focus. On Tuesday, DAC has dedicated a full day to a "Management Track" consisting of keynotes, panels, and special presentations by experts on business topics that affect technology decisions and directions.

Also, the ninth annual Workshop for Women in Design Automation (WWINDA) will be held Monday and promises to address the "Cultural Evolution: Keeping Pace with Organizational Diversity." Executives from throughout the industry will share personal experiences and discuss ideas for effectively managing the rapidly changing composition of today's global workforce.

DAC is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery/Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Circuits and Systems Society (IEEE/CASS/CANDE) and by the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDA Consortium).

All in all, the 42nd DAC promises to be the most exciting DAC we have seen in a long while. We hope to see you there!