Whats Hot at DAC Today

Glancing through the technical program, here's what I'm particularly excited about today.

1) Special Session on Mechanisms for Surviving Uncertainty in Semiconductor Design (10:30-12:00, Room 133) http://www.dac.com/events/eventdetails.aspx?id=95-2

Dealing with variations and uncertainty in design has been a hot topic at DAC for the last few years, but I think that the focus on micro-architectural and system-level techniques to mitigate process variation, which seems to be the theme of this session, is relatively new. I had a chance to read the papers yesterday night and have lots of questions, so I'm really looking forward to this!

2) Special Session on Dawn of the 22nm Design Era (2:00-4:00, Room 133)http://www.dac.com/events/eventdetails.aspx?id=95-8

Features a bunch of interesting talks. I've attended some of Shekhar Borkar's talks before and they're always provocative, and importantly, provide pointers for future research issues, so don't plan to miss this one. The other talks are from Andrzej Strojwas (CMU), Kaushik Roy (Purdue) and Carl Anderson (IBM).


3) Technical Session on Design Flexibility (4:30-6:00, Room 124)
http://www.dac.com/events/eventdetails.aspx?id=95-18

Features one of the best paper award candidates intriguingly titled "A Design Origami: Folding Streams in FPGAs." Didn't get a chance to glance over the paper, but hopefully the presentation will be informative.

4) Last but certainly not he least, the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum (http://www.sigda.org/daforum/) will be held between 6:00-7:30 in Room 134. This is an opportunity of senior or recently graduated Ph.D. students to talk about their research and get feedback from other students, faculty and industry. I was exhibiting my research at this event last year and got some really great feedback, so I hope to return the favor this year :).