feature article
Subscribe Now

I Love DAC

Austin Hosts Annual Nerdfest

Trade shows are dead. Engineers are highly rational people, and there is no rational justification for squandering valuable travel budget, time, and other business resources to fly from goodness knows where to Austin Texas in June to attend the 53rd annual Design Automation Conference (DAC). Any information one could hope to gather about the latest wave of electronic design automation software could much more easily and efficiently be gleaned from countless online and other sources. With the entire week and thousands of dollars that each attendee blows on an annual DAC pilgrimage, substantial project progress could be posted. Disrupting that critical work schedule to spend time at something as superfluous as DAC makes no sense whatsoever. 

DAC revels in not making sense.

DAC is an enigma, a paradox, a Lewis Carrollian descent into an illogical landscape of Lilliputian enormity. DAC simulates with nothing but Xs, it returns null pointers, it invites the attendee to plunge into a virtual pool of inter-dimensional chaos – where executives from multi-million dollar corporations wait in line to watch B-list magicians spew marketing schtick – in order to secure a chance to win obsolete tech gadgets whose boxes will never ever be opened.  DAC is a world where billion-dollar software companies engage in subterfuge that would make cold war spies proud, taking turns wooing a vanishingly small cadre of actual prospects while simultaneously playing intricate games of espionage and counter-espionage in a vain attempt to defend their intellectual property from prying rival eyes. DAC is the place where you simultaneously display and hide your latest innovations. 

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for anyone to go to DAC. And yet, for the fifty-third time, here we all are.  

Fads do not endure for fifty-three years. Nothing remains popular for half a century simply because it is trendy or fashionable. To put DAC’s longevity into perspective, the first DAC convened about three years BEFORE Gordon Moore published the iconic “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” – giving birth to the idea of Moore’s Law. Think about that for a minute. The technology with arguably the biggest influence on Moore’s Law’s five-decade run understood its role long before Moore’s Law was even conceived. It’s remarkable. 

To look at it another way – way back when the most complex silicon chips possible had a single-digit number of transistors – when primitive, state-of-the-art computers that occupied entire buildings were painstakingly built by hand out of discrete components, a small group of visionaries said, “Hey, in the future, computer software will be an essential tool for designing electronic components. We should make a conference for that.” 

Without that vision, Moore’s Law would have stalled right out of the gate. Within the first few years, the complexity of ICs grew to a point where traditional, manual approaches to engineering would not scale. Today, even if every man, woman, and child on Earth were magically endowed with top-flight traditional engineering skills, the planet could not produce a single chip without the aid of today’s incredibly sophisticated design tool software. If not for DAC, today’s world-changing technology would simply not exist.

DAC does not make sense.

As an engineering conference, DAC is designed as a forum for EDA engineers to share the latest techniques and advances in design automation technology. Every important new placement, routing, simulation, verification, and capture algorithm of the past several decades was probably presented in some form at a DAC paper session. PhD students from every important design automation research university program in the world made their bid for high-flying positions by cracking the code of DAC’s discriminating technical committee and getting their papers accepted.

Ironically, for the past many years, the very EDA engineers for whom the technical program is intended have been largely barred from attending DAC. Since EDA companies view DAC as a trade show and a marketing vehicle, and since the budget for “DAC the Trade Show” is already unjustifiably huge just counting the marketing, sales, and booth support for the show portion, the idea of spending even MORE money so their EDA engineers can attend “DAC the Conference” – the premiere technical conference in their area of expertise – becomes fiscally distasteful. Plus, who wants their best engineers wandering the aisles of a conference, vulnerable to the siren song of competitive recruitment? Nobody – that’s who. 

And the “Trade Show” portion of DAC is aimed at a completely different audience from the “Conference” portion of DAC – engineering customers of EDA companies, rather than EDA engineers themselves. That means the conference attendees have little reason to cruise the show floor, and the trade show attendees have little motivation to attend technical paper sessions. DAC has tried to correct this, of course. But the trade show is solidly the #1 in-person venue for EDA companies to take their annual shot at one-upping each other, and DAC the conference is stubbornly dedicated to furthering design automation technology. 

As a marketing vehicle for EDA companies, DAC is probably the worst investment on the planet. The three big EDA companies (the only ones with actual distribution, sales, and support channels that reach the world’s big systems companies), all have enormous booths, carefully designed to show virtually nothing to passersby on the show floor. Instead, those who can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are valid potential customers (and not competitive spies or journalists) are escorted discreetly into the catacombs of the booth, where they are treated to private demos and furnished with hors d’oeuvres and other refreshments in an attempt to prevent them from having time to attend similar super-secret presentations in the competitors’ booths.

The smaller EDA companies fill the remainder of the show floor with breathless ploys to entice traffic into their domains, hoping for that one big deal that will justify the extraordinary expense of placing and staffing a DAC booth. With the diminishing numbers of actual EDA prospects attending DAC, there are far more fishermen than fish, however. The best attention a small EDA company can realistically get is showing up on the radar of one of the big 3 as a future acquisition target.

Every year, people ask me “What’s new at DAC this year?” or “What would you see as the major themes in this year’s DAC?” I’ve attended 33 of the 53 DACs now, and my answer has never once changed. The major theme is always what Gordon Moore wrote: “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” Nothing more. Nothing less.

If you tried to calculate a cost-per-lead based on the total spend for a vendor to attend the show versus the number of attendees who see each vendor’s demonstrations, the answer would cause heart palpitations in even the most generous of bean counters. DAC is not an equation. It is not a business decision guided by traditional marketing metrics. It is not rational. DAC is instead an affair of passion. It is a moral imperative. It is an event that is attended with the heart rather than the head.

I love DAC.

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Jun 2, 2023
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not just words but values that are exemplified through our culture at Cadence. In the DEI@Cadence blog series, you'll find a community where employees share their perspectives and experiences. By providing a glimpse of their personal...
Jun 2, 2023
I just heard something that really gave me pause for thought -- the fact that everyone experiences two forms of death (given a choice, I'd rather not experience even one)....
Jun 2, 2023
Explore the importance of big data analytics in the semiconductor manufacturing process, as chip designers pull insights from throughout the silicon lifecycle. The post Demanding Chip Complexity and Manufacturing Requirements Call for Data Analytics appeared first on New Hor...

featured video

Find Out How The Best Custom Design Tools Just Got Better

Sponsored by Cadence Design Systems

The analog design world we know is evolving. And so is Cadence Virtuoso technology. Learn how the best analog tools just got better to help you keep pace with your challenging design issues. The AI-powered Virtuoso Studio custom design solution provides innovative features, reimagined infrastructure for unrivaled productivity, generative AI for design migration, and new levels of integration that stretch beyond classic design boundaries.

Click here for more information

featured paper

EC Solver Tech Brief

Sponsored by Cadence Design Systems

The Cadence® Celsius™ EC Solver supports electronics system designers in managing the most challenging thermal/electronic cooling problems quickly and accurately. By utilizing a powerful computational engine and meshing technology, designers can model and analyze the fluid flow and heat transfer of even the most complex electronic system and ensure the electronic cooling system is reliable.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

Optimize Performance: RF Solutions from PCB to Antenna
RF is a ubiquitous design element found in a large variety of electronic designs today. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and Rahul Rajan from Amphenol RF discuss how you can optimize your RF performance through each step of the signal chain. They examine how you can utilize Amphenol’s RF wide range of connectors including solutions for PCBs, board to board RF connectivity, board to panel and more!
May 25, 2023
1,338 views