The Analog program at DAC 2009

The program for this year's Design Automation Conference in San Francisco was published this week, including several interesting sessions on analog/mixed-signal design. On Tuesday July 28, at 2:30pm, there will be a Pavilion panel discussion on the topic "Will Interoperable PDKs Fly in a Stodgy Analog World?". (Excuse me... exactly what is stodgy about analog?). The session was organized by Synopsys, and it is very interesting to see that a representative from Cadence will be on the panel, given that they have referred to interoperable PDKs as the "lowest common denominator" for pcell design.

Will Interoperable PDKs Fly in a Stodgy Analog World?

Speakers:

Ed Lechner - Synopsys, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Bill Heiser - Cadence Design Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA
Tom Quan - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., San Jose, CA

On Wednesday July 29, at 3:00pm, another Pavilion panel has the topic "The AMS Revival: Bipolar Thinking?". Hmm, first analog is stodgy... and now we're bipolar? Hey, what's up with that? You've got to be careful with casting aspersions to mental disorders these days. The politically-correct crowd has gotten all over the Psycho Donuts shop here in silicon valley recently. (Don't they know there's no such thing as bad publicity?)

In any case, here is the description published for the bipolar DAC panel:

The AMS Revival: Bipolar Thinking?
Experts from semiconductor, EDA and ESL debate the essentials of mixed-signal/software co-design and what is needed in ESL to bring AMS on-board. They will discuss bridging the gap between AMS and digital design, improving AMS designer productivity, design methodologies, and AMS features in HDLs and SystemC.

Speakers:

Martin Barnasconi - NXP Semiconductors, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Mike Woodward - The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA
David Smith - Synopsys, Inc., Hillsboro, OR

Oh how I love the smell of solder in the morning! Sorry.. I drifted off there for a moment. (Apologies to Francis Ford Coppola).

After the bipolar disorders are accounted for... also on Wednesday July 29, at 4:30pm, there is a panel on "Guess, Solder, Measure, Repeat – How Do I Get My Mixed-Signal Chip Right?", jointly organized by Cadence and Synopsys.
This panel discusses one of my favorite topics: "the state of affairs in analog-mixed signal verification". (One can assume this has nothing to do with who is sleeping with whom. Hey, this is stodgy AMS... right?).

Guess, Solder, Measure, Repeat – How Do I Get My Mixed-Signal Chip Right?

Speakers:

Georges Gielen - Katholieke Univ., Leuven, Belgium
Martin O'Leary - Cadence Design Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA
Eric Grimme - Intel Corp., Hillsboro, OR
Sandeep Tare - Texas Instruments, Inc., Dallas, TX
Warren Wong - Synopsys, Inc., Mountain View, CA

There is more on AMS in the DAC technical sessions, which you can check out on the DAC website. I know many of the panelists participating in these sessions, so I expect to see some very interesting discussions.

-Mike