47th DAC: Design ecosystem comes together to deliver solutions from design to manufacturing

DAC 2010, ANAHEIM, USA: The 47th Design Automation Conference (DAC), the premier conference devoted to electronic design and design automation, which starts Monday, June 14 at the Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, CA, will be remembered as the year that front-end and back-end design came together, allowing attendees to see solutions that cover all processes from design through to manufacturing.

EDA tool companies, intellectual property (IP) companies, and service companies will exhibit and present information on solutions that enable integrated circuit (IC) and system-on-chip (SOC) designers to optimize for performance and manufacturability at advanced process nodes.

Major foundries are participating at an unprecedented level to help design team customers realize accelerated design, reduced design costs, faster system-to-IC implementation, and faster time-to-volume. For example:

* GLOBALFOUNDRIES will announce details of its partner ecosystem during DAC, going far beyond the design kits of the past to include EDA partners, IP partners, service partners, mask service partners, and assembly and test partners.

* TSMC has extended its Open Innovation Platform beyond its focus on power, performance and area considerations to move up to include electronic-system level design, virtual platforms, high-level synthesis, mixed-signal and RF design, and multi-die approaches using through-silicon via (TSV) manufacturing capabilities.

* TowerJazz will announce jointly with Cadence design kits for their SiGe BiCMOS process as a high-value feature to enable customers to quickly achieve system realization as part of Cadence’s EDA360 vision.

* The Common Platform of IBM, Chartered, and Samsung, with its associated design ecosystem, will also be making an announcement at DAC regarding their latest collaborative efforts.

Other foundries also participating at DAC include X-fab Semiconductor Foundries and austriamicrosystems.

“The increasing involvement of foundries in creating partnerships between design and IP are lowering the barrier to building a system, all the way from concept to manufactured silicon,” said Sachin Sapatnekar, General Chair of the 47th DAC Executive Committee.

“EDA is no longer just about the intricacies of producing silicon. It’s pushing up to the system level, and at the same time, building on the foundry ecosystems so that complex designs can move smoothly into manufacturing.”

Additionally, as part of DAC’s commitment to the design chain ecosystem, Thursday, June 17th, will be Embedded/SOC Enablement Day, which will include three sessions focused on embedded processor-based systems-on-chip and their enablement.

The Embedded/SOC Enablement Day is a day-long track of sessions dedicated to bringing industry stakeholders together in one room to shed light on where SOC design is headed. IC design engineers, embedded systems designers, IP integrators, FPGA designers, design services companies, investors, foundry reps, and the media will hear from market leaders and network with each other.

Presenters will focus on the optimization of embedded and application-domain specific operating systems, system architectures for future SOCs, application-specific architectures based on embedded processors, and technical/business decision-making in this domain.