DAC votes for power management

7/1/2009 10:33 AM EDT

In a very close race, a month-long vote resulted in 35 percent of voters selecting the power scavenging topic.

The new community-driven selection process is apparently DAC's ongoing efforts to have its program address the needs of not only EDA developers and researchers, but also IC designers and design tool users.

"It was very important to us to provide this opportunity to the design community to participate in the setting of the conference agenda, and we are heartened by the excellent response," said Rich Goldman, chairman of the Pavilion Panel Committee.

The committee's statement: "With power consumption an ever-more-limiting design and system challenge, a panel of experts will discuss unexploited and hidden sources of power and how to harness them for some of today's most complex applications."

Apparently hundreds of EDA industry voters chose among the four possible topics: wearable sensor networks; power scavenging; the collision of mobile and PC technologies; and career survival advice during the current economic situation.

You would think at in this prolonged recession this last topic would be a more favorite one to explore.

Nice to see that the engineering community still has a flair for tackling a real engineering problem: power management.

Panelists for the community panel will include: Professor Sandeep Kundu of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Steve Grady of Cymbet; and Mark Buccini of Texas Instruments. Chip Design Magazine's editor John Blyler will moderate the panel.

If you're at DAC, don't forget Management Day consisting of three sessions on July 28.

I'll be chairing "Trade-Offs and Choices for Emerging SOCs." "Decision Making for Complex SOCs," will be chaired by Ed Sperling of System Level Design and "Making Critical Decisions for Emerging SOC Development," moderated by Peggy Aycinena, EDA Confidential and a guest blogger on the EDA DesignLine site.