Design Automation Conference
June 13 - 17, 2005
Activities Statement
Young Student Support Program Statement The 42nd Design Automation Conference is sponsoring a Professional Development Program to encourage advanced undergraduate students (Junior or Senior levels) and first-year graduate students (beginning first year, or finishing first and beginning second year) to join the electronic design automation profession or pursue graduate studies in this field. This program will introduce students to DAC and the design automation profession through meetings, tours, and by association with a mentor who is an advanced graduate student already working in the area.Along with participation in the Young Student Support Program I will attend workshops and meetings as well as visit the exhibit hall. Specifically I plan to attend the workshops entitled "Introduction to Chips and EDA for a Non-Technical Audience" and "Workshop for Women in Design Automation - Cultural Evolution: Keeping Pace with Organizational Diversity". The first workshop will provide an explanation of how chips are designed and manufactured as well as an understanding of the relationship between Electronic Design Automation and chip design. The second workshop "explores ways that organizations can keep pace with changing business and workforce diversity needs through new approaches to cultural evolution. Speakers, panelists and participants are from a variety of companies known for their strong, yet adaptable, cultures."
Design Automation Conference Young Student Summary
I found the entire conference interesting and quite overwhelming at the same time. Being an undergraduate student, most of the information and theories discussed were over my head. I approached this experience as an opportunity to get a taste of this field, which will potentially influence my career and education decisions in the future.I started off the conference with two workshops on Monday: Introduction to Chips and EDA for a Non-Technical Audience and Workshop for Women in Design Automation. The first one was a great, very basic introduction to the EDA field as a whole. Although I had learned or at least seen most of the material presented it was good in the end since I spent most of the rest of the week trying to grasp at the ideas presented. I especially enjoyed the Workshop for Women because of its keynote speaker. Jane Margolis has spent significant time studying the gender and race gap in the field of computer science as she attempts to identify the causes for this situation.
Over the next few days of the conference I attended both keynote speeches (Bernard S. Meyerson: How Does One Define "Technology" Now That Classical Scaling Is Dead (and Has Been for Years)? and Ronald A. Rohrer Innovation in the EDA Business Need Not Be an Oxymoron) as well as a handful of sessions. Since I found out very quickly that I would barely understand any of the papers presented at this conference I decided it would be best for me to attend sessions from a wide variety of topic areas in order to get a feel for the problems tackled across this wide field.
Session 2 Special Session: Error-Tolerant Design (Logic Design & Test)
Session 7 Statistical Timing Analysis (Design for Manufacturing)
Session 16 Special Session: Closing the Power Gap Between ASIC and Custom (Power)
Session 24 Methods and Representations for Logic Synthesis (Logic Design & Test)
Session 29 Advances in Synthesis (Logic Design & Test)
Session 36 Special Session: MATLAB: The Other Emerging System-Design Language (System-Level Design and Verification)
Session 42 Embedded Hardware and System Software (Embedded Systems)
At first I attended sessions that either have something to do with my summer research or sessions that I do have some background knowledge on. The last few sessions were chosen to diversify the sessions I attended. I had not thought of MATLAB as a useful tool in this field. In between sessions I took several trips through the exhibits hall to talk with representatives of companies and see what kinds of EDA tools are out there. I also attended the CMU CSSI Alumni & Friends Reception and the DAC Wednesday Night Party.
In general, I feel that this whole experience was beneficial to my education. I was able to talk with several people in industry and get their opinion on the field. It was interesting to see the different perspectives between people in academia and those in industry. I plan on taking more courses related to this field in the coming year as well as in graduate school. Perhaps I will attend this conference next year when it is in San Francisco.