Promising new addition to DAC next year: User Track

As a relatively new person in EDA, I was surprised at how 'inside baseball' many of the technical tracks can be at DAC. I've been hoping that the technical tracks could become much more relevant to the average design engineer.

There's a new track for next year's DAC entitled the DAC User Track. It sounds very promising -- here's an excerpt from the call for extended abstracts:

This year, DAC is introducing a new User Track to address the issues facing designers, application engineers, and design flow developers. User Track papers describe the use of EDA tools to design a novel electronic system, or to produce a design flow or a methodology to produce such systems. A User Track paper may be problem-specific in scope (e.g., analyzing substrate coupling during floorplanning) or may address a specific application domain (e.g., designing wireless handsets), though applications to other types of designs and design flows could be inferred.