Guest Blog by Leon Stok (IBM) for DAC: From Design Platforms to Design Flows

I'm pretty excited about DAC this year, despite the economy. It's back in San Francisco, which is where my heart often is. I spent almost ten years in the Bay Area after going to school there. I've been back in Boston since 1991, but love every trip to the Bay Area.

DAC's doing a lot to get users more involved. This year, there's a user track, which looks very interesting -- and it's the subject of this guest blog from one of the officials from DAC. When I first attended DAC in 2004, I was struck by how "inside baseball" many of the technical presentations were. There are definitely end users keenly interested in this type of presentation -- but there are a lot of design automation issues that are more relevant and useful to the typical end user. Of course, the exhibits target the typical end user, but the new user track is one of the DAC's technical track initiatives targeting the typical end user.

Leon Stok, who works at IBM, is the chair of New Initiatives for the 46th DAC. Here's his post on the user track, entitled From Design Platforms to Design Flows:

Increasingly, the progress in the EDA industry needs to come from better design flows. In the PBC era, for example, point tool inventions like routing, placement and logic synthesis greatly improved productivity. Designers could put a simple linear design flow together where one point tool could rely on reasonable accurate predictions of the downstream design process.

When predictability disappeared from the design process due to submicron effects, a simple linear design flow of point tools stopped working and very complex integrated tools were created to iteratively solve design problems. Timing analysis and synthesis got combined first, followed by integration of placement, routing, clocking and power and signal integrity analysis.

In the last few years, large CAD vendors spend most of their development dollars on integration efforts and have built complex tool platforms. Most startups have not been able to keep pace with investment required to build tool platforms and, in many tool areas, their relevance is disappearing from the EDA scene.

Despite these tool platforms being very powerful, to harness their power questions abound to confound even the most seasoned designer:
• How does one harness the power of these integrated tool platforms?
• How does one ensure that the proper and correct technology definitions are fed to these tools in a consistent manner?
• How do you put a design flow together that understands the proper low-power concepts from system-level design to final physical implementation?
• How do we ensure we end up with a testable design?
• How do we measure the overall productivity of the design teams using these integrated flows?

Where does one get an answer to these types of questions? The three-day User Track at the upcoming 46th Design Automation Conference will focus on how one actually puts design flows together that address these problems. At this forum, 40 presentations from design teams hailing from many companies will share their experiences on how they put robust design flows together.

An Ice Cream Social Wednesday from 1:30-3 p.m. with 42 posters will offer an opportunity for you to mingle with other EDA tool users.

The User Track is included with the full-conference registration. Or, register separately for the User Track and attend the keynotes. For more details, visit: www.dac.com. I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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Note: This year’s DAC will be held July 26-31 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Register today at: www.dac.com.