Taken for Granted

Day 2 of DAC (Tuesday July 28) is the first day of the technical programme and there were several other events I was able to attend in part as well as deal with a couple of other commitments.   DAC 2009 has an extremely busy schedule and it is impossible to do all that I wanted to do.  Usually I was able to attend only part of a session, but I did manage to graze in several.  Here are a few notes on today’s activities:

1. I started with the GreenSoCs breakfast, and saw the very beginning of the panel discussion on “SystemC TLM – Just Add Water”?   I managed to hear Michel Genard of Virtutech and Trevor Wieman of Intel talk before having to dash out – but I wish I had been able to stay for the rest of the discussion.
2. The 10:30 panel in the main programme on “System Prototypes – Virtual, Hardware or Hybrid?” had the potential to be lively but the part I was able to attend seemed to be a consensus without many points of controversy.
3. The ChipEstimate panel on “Silicon IP – Beyond Chips to Systems” at 3:30 had a couple of good quotes from Naveed Sherwani of Open-Silicon.  First, in commenting about IP integration in complex designs, he said:

“We pray also to all gods”

and in talking about the IP industry in general

“The IP industry (both external and internal) is undercapitalised”

At that point, I felt like asking him to take out his cheque book!

I also dropped into the Accellera-Spirit merger celebration meeting and the ACM SigDA PhD forum.  This was notable in comparison with recent PhD forums I have been in in Europe – it seemed relatively more physical EDA and back-end bound, and relatively less front end and system-bound than the ones in Europe.

I was going to go to the Denali party for a bit, but after these activities and several commitments and meetings, I was tired and BARTed it back home.   Tomorrow I hope to do more and will report on what I see at DAC again.