SAN FRANCISCO-Unless you've secluded yourself on a remote mountaintop, you know that the 35th Design Automation Conference (DAC) is in full swing here this week.

More than 20,000 system-on-a-chip professionals are expected to visit the Moscone Center, and 170 exhibitors are registered for the conference.

You can find breaking news and in-depth feature coverage from the show, along with RealAudio clips of key events, at the EE Times OnlineDAC News Center. Background material from the paper's EDA experts is offered in the "DAC Technology Trends" section, and there are EDA-related Web links to check out.

SEMICONDUCTORONLINE features a forum on a DAC-centric topic: intellectual property rights. You can select the "forums" button to join the discussion on this topic: "How well do U.S. and foreign patent protections serve the semiconductor industry?"

DAC: Monday at 11:45 a.m. at the San Francisco Marriott, Capt. James Lovell, the veteran U.S. astronaut portrayed by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13,will speak.

DAC: Monday at 6 o'clock at the Yerba Buena Ballroom in the San Francisco Marriott hotel, the 1998 DAC Challenge, presented by EE Timesand Quicklogic Corp., will be held. Teams will compete to determine who has the best brains for EDA trivia.

DAC: Tuesday's opening session, at 10:30 a.m., is the Executive Plenary Panel: "Customers, Vendors and Universities: Determining the Future of EDA." The complete listings for the show's technical sessions are available on the official DAC site.

DAC: Tuesday's keynote speaker is Bill Spencer, chairman of Sematech Inc., a non-profit R&D consortium of U.S. semiconductor manufacturers. He'll discuss design-automation challenges.

DAC: Thursday's keynote speaker is George H. Heilmeier, chairman emeritus of Bellcore (Morristown, N.J.). The pioneering liquid-crystal-display (LCD) developer's speech is "From POTS to PANS: Transition in the World of Telecommunications for the Late '90s and Beyond".

BROWSE THE ONLINE ARCHIVES of last year's DAC show in Anaheim. Find abstracts, session and author indexes, and panel sessions in RealAudio.

DESIGN AND REUSE (Grenoble Cedex, France) will be on hand, and the company's site has DAC-related material. The site offers a "Yellow Pages" with information on over 1,200 reuse blocks in both ASIC and PLD technologies from more than 88 providers.

THE VIRTUAL SOCKET INTERFACE ALLIANCE (VSI), a consortium of 150 companies representing all segments of the IP industry, has a special DAC site. Get info on its Technology Symposium, slated for Tuesday at the show (www.vsi.org/events/dac98.htm). Also check out NEWLY RELEASED SPECIFICATIONS online.

MENTOR GRAPHICS has a DAC site: "Welcome to the Age of Deep Submicron." Find out about the company's design-re-use methodology and advanced verification techniques.

SYNCHRONICITY INC., which was a high-profile company at last year's DAC, offers an onsite article on "The Internet and EDA: Survival of the Fittest." It discusses the impact of collaborative EDA Web tools.

XILINX INC. will be at DAC, fresh from its star turn in this month's issue of Discover Magazine. The company's technology is the centerpiece of the cover article, "Evolving a Conscious Machine." Scientists think that by letting chips "build themselves," chips can be "stunningly efficient and effective, like the human brain." The Xilinx XC6216 FPGA is the enabler for the "Darwin Chip."