What's Hot at DAC on Thursday

There are two big events slated for the day, and I'll mention them in the order of what I'm looking forward to more.

Wild and Crazy Idea (WACI) Session (9:00AM Room 131) This has been one of the most popular sessions at DAC since it was first help two years back. The idea is to have people present "whacky" ideas that aren't necessarily perfectly fleshed out, but are more revolutionary rather than evolutionary. Here are two interesting papers from this session

• "Human Computing for EDA" DeOrio and Bertacco, U. Michigan
• "A Learning Digital Computer" Barr, Basu, Brink, Hasler, GaTech

SPECIAL PLENARY PANEL: How Green Is My Silicon Valley (12:00 noon, Gateway Ballroom) The Keynote Session yesterday was preceded by a video plugging this session, so there's certainly been an attempt to drum up publicity for this. Given the impressive list of invited panelists, it should be interesting; I just hope the panelists emphasize the bridge to the EDA community. There's a related session on green data centers in the evening today that promises to be more immediately relevant to EDA folks.

I'm at the speaker breakfast right now where they just announced the best paper ward winners, though I presume its not going to be made public till the formal award ceremony. There was an excellent selection of best paper award nominees this year, but without discrediting any of the nominees, my personal pick for best paper, which wasn't even nominated :( , was in this session, titled "Physically Justifiable Die-Level Modeling of Spatial Variation in View of Systematic Across Wafer Variability." If any of the authors are reading this, great job guys!