DATE '06 to explore real-world designs

MANHASSET, N.Y. — This year's Design Automation and Test in Europe conference will again feature a track of presentations by industry executives representing a range of semiconductor manufacturers, system houses, EDA vendors, fabless houses, IP providers and equipments suppliers.

The one-day program to be held on March 7, the first day of the conference, will follow the opening session. Industry execuitves will present their technical and business visions for the current 90-nm technology era.

Two keynote speakers will address the semicondcutor and EDA challenges for next-generation designs. René Penning de Vries, CTO of Philips Semiconductors, will address EDA challenges in the converging application world. Walden Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics and Chairman of the EDA Consortium, will ponder the sociology of design and EDA.

Executives from Toshiba , Actel, Cisco Systems, MontaVista, Tensilica, MathWorks and Cadence are also scheduled to participate.

A second track will explore future trends for EDA tools. Executives from Broadcom, VaST Systems, Magma Design Automation, STMicroelectronics, CoWare, Synfora and Infineon will participate. The third track on design for manufacturability includes executives from Synopsys, TSMC, Mentor Graphics, Freescale, Denali Software and Innovative Semiconductor.

DATE '06 also will see the launch of a new initiative called System Design Records, where selected technical papers focus on performance, power management, innovation and system designs. Among the papers are a discussion of how two-phase resonant clocking can be used in hearing-aid applications. Another will tackle reconfigurable platforms used for real-time digital film applications.

A two-day design forum (March 8-9) will include presentations from designers whose reviewed technical papers describe real-world designs and implementations of system design technologies. Among the topics are: security systems; reconfigurable computing; specification and verification criteria; wireles communications and networking; standards for design chain integration; on-chip communication networks; automotive, and media and signal processing.

A special session on wireless sensor networks will focus on key issues involved in the design of sensor networks. Hardware platforms for sensor nodes that address resource limitation issues such as low-power, limited memory, and small size will be discussed, and technical papers will be presented on power communication issues.

DATE '06 runs from March 6-10 in Munich, Germany.