Accordingly, ISQED 2001 — sponsored by the IEEE and various companies and publications — had four tutorials, three panels, and eight keynote speakers over the course of its three-day run in Santa Clara, CA this week. More important than the quantity here, the quality — in particular of the keynote speakers — was impressive. Tuesday morning had four plenary talks including presentations from Hajime Sasaki, chairman of the board for NEC; Joe Costello, EDA-industry legend and CEO of think3; Raul Camposano, CTO and general manager at Synopsys; and Ed Ross, president of TSMC, USA. Wednesday morning's speakers included: Wojciech Maly, from Carnegie Mellon University; Vinod Agrawal, CEO at Logic Vision; Aki Fujimura, COO and president of Simplex; and Phillippe Magarshack, vice president at ST Microelectonics.

The conference also included 40 technical papers chosen out of over 100 submissions and, adding to the energy at the conference the Ph.D. student poster session buzzed with visitors and discussion in the hallway on Wednesday afternoon.

Ali and team have tried to keep the focus of the conference as its name implies: on the quality of design. He says, "I studied conferences before I started ISQED," and in so doing, he found no single meeting or show centered solely on the quality of design. Ali and team have, therefore, tried to keep the focus of the conference specifically on quality. "Quality is defined by time to market, functionality, timing, yield, and reliability," he says.

Ali says that designers and manufacturers need to be ever mindful of that definition, as do the EDA vendors who facilitate design. He comments that the semiconductor industry has a roadmap, but EDA does not. He agrees with many industry observers that believe the EDA industry needs a consistent roadmap to help guide and coordinate their efforts — one that the vendors would be held accountable for.

Meanwhile, he acknowledges that the most frustrating part of the conference — or any conference for that matter — is the effort on the part of the committees and session chairs to get the speakers to check their marketing hats at the door. It is almost impossible, Ali says, to preview all of the Power Point presentations in advance because some of them come in so late or on the actual day of the presentation that no one on the conference committee has time to review them. Ideally, the company logos and marketing lingo would be left off of the slides and, in Ali's words, "mature" technical presentations would be the norm from the beginning to the end of the conference.

He says, "No one in technology was ever denied a promotion just because they didn't have enough instances of the company logo on their presentation slides." However, he also acknowledges that time constraints often mean that speakers rely on other staff members, frequently people in marketing, to prepare the visuals — hence the unavoidable presence of company logos on technical slides.

Two best papers were awarded at the conference complete with plaque and cash award: Andrew Kahng and Stefanus Mantik of U.C. San Diego and U.C.L.A. received a best paper award for their work on "A System for Automatic Recording and Prediction of Design Quality Metrics." Jayang Deodhar, Intel Corp., and Spyros Tragoudas, Southern Illinois University, were recipients of the second best paper award for their work on "Color Counting and its Application to Path Delay Fault Coverage."

Finally, Tung-Yang Chen and Ming-Dou Ker from the Integrated Circuits & Systems Laboratory, Institute of Electronics National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan received the best Ph.D. student paper for their work on "Design on ESD Protection Circuit with Very Low and Constant Input Capacitance."

Economic downturn in the semiconductor industry notwithstanding, if anyone doubted that energy and innovation still abounds in electronic design, their doubts would have been quelled by the enthusiasm of the attendees at this second annual ISQED. Ali Iranmanesh and his committee should be proud of what they've started. Someone asked Ali at the end of the conference if he was tired. "Absolutely not," he said. "This is fun!"