It's not too late to get in an Accellera Technical Excellence Award nomination ...

** TSMC U.S. Technology Symposium – Organizers say the event will take place on April 26 at the San Jose Convention Center. The symposium is scheduled to "highlight state-of-the art semiconductor technology and services that benefit leading Silicon Valley semiconductor companies. This year, TSMC proudly features Mike Melvill, pilot of the first commercially funded spaceflight, as the keynote speaker."

** Mentor Graphics User2User Conference – This will be the 21st annual Mentor Graphics Users' Conference, and it's happening April 27th to 29th in Santa Clara, CA.

The company says, "The event will feature two keynote speakers. Aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, chief designer of SpaceShipOne, the world's first private manned spacecraft, will present the first keynote. SpaceShipOne earned the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for its two successful launches into space within a 14-day time frame. The second keynote speaker will be Michael Sander of NASA's JPL. Sander leads the JPL efforts in support of the new NASA Exploration Initiative. In addition, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of the Discovery Channel's MythBusters will also make an appearance."

** Denali MemCon 2005 – Organizers say this is "the industry's premier event for leading-edge trends in the business and technology of semiconductor memory, storage, and chip-to-chip communications." Each event includes keynotes, panel discussions, and more. Upcoming dates include MemCon Austin on April 28th at the Barton Creek Resort in Austin, TX, MemCon Tokyo on September 15th and 16th at the Tokyo Conference Center, and MemCon San Jose on October 12th and 13th at the Westin Santa Clara.

** Accellera invites Nominations – Per organizers: "You are invited to nominate an individual for the second annual Accellera Technical Excellence Award. This award recognizes major contributions to the development of standards in Accellera. Examples of such contributions may include leadership in standardization of new technologies, assuring achievement of standards development goals, identifying opportunities to better serve the needs of the industry through standards. Accellera wishes to recognize the outstanding achievements of its technical committee members. This will be done by selecting contributors to the Accellera standards development process. Please send your nomination by April 30th to: Victor Berman, Chair of the Accellera Awards Committee, email: award@accellera.org The award will be announced on June 15th."

** 2005 EDA Tech Forum - Mentor Graphics, as well as Altera, Artisan/ARM, Chartered Semiconductor, The Mathworks, VSIA, and Accellera will be sponsoring this series of conferences in the coming months. Organizers say that each conference will include: "Technical sessions and hands-on self-paced workshops [that] address real-life design issues in IC nanometer design, functional verification, integrated system design, and emerging technologies, with presenters from [sponsoring] companies." All told, 18 conferences are scheduled for various venues worldwide in 2005 including: Dallas, Texas; Phoenix, Boston, San Jose, Ottawa, Dresden, Reading, Paris, Penang, Bangalore, Delhi, Beijing, Shanghai, Hsinchu, Seoul, Tokyo, and Kyoto." Oh my - get out that atlas!

** SAME 2005 is inviting you to submit a paper to their upcoming 2005 conference, to be held in the Science Technological Park of Sophia Antipolis, France on October 5th and 6th. Organizers says this year, the main topic for the forum will be System in Package & System on Chip. Of course there are other categories as well, so you should be checking out the website and figuring out where to position your work. Deadline for submissions in May 2nd. Hurry!

** EDAC Spring Members Meeting – The event will be held on Wednesday, May 4th, at the Sunnyvale headquarters of AMD. The evening's panel is titled, "Shaking Things Up in the Electronic Design Business" and will include CoWare's Alan Naumann, MontaVista Software's Jim Ready, PDF Solutions' Dave Joseph, and Synplicity's Gary Meyers. The panel will be moderated by everybody's favorite VC, Lucio Lanza of Lanza TechVentures' fame. The 5 men intend to "share their views on the business models, licensing models, and technologies that could generate seismic shifts in EDA. Each panelist will describe what his company is doing to 'shake things up,' the decisions and events that led his business to where it is today – and lessons learned along the way – as well as strategies for market success. You won't want to miss this chance to gain new insights on where today's innovative companies see opportunities for business and industry growth."

** EVE Verification Seminars – Emulation and Verification Engineering is holding a series of half-day seminars in Sunnyvale, CA (May 17th & 18th), Irvine, CA (May 19th), and Austin, TX (May 20th). The company says that eVera Consulting Corp.'s Pete James will provide instruction on how to create a strategic verification plan. The agenda includes step-by-step guidance on how to design and document a verification system, taking into account the latest in verification languages, test generation, coverage, checking and debug. Attendees will receive a copy of James' book Verification Plans.

** DAC 2005 –

June 13th to the 17th
Anaheim Convention Center

Organizers say: "Electronic design has never been easy. And with today's growing technical challenges, customer expectations, and competitive pressures, it's not getting any easier. That's why more than 10,000 electronic designers, engineers, researchers, managers, and exhibitors will be coming to the 42nd Design Automation Conference. They're looking for the edge they need to make their best efforts better. The edge they find only when they learn about the latest in design methodologies and tool development, make valuable contacts, and hear exhilarating ideas from the industry's best thinkers. The edge they get only at the industry's largest, most diverse, most important annual gathering."

This year's program includes the following topic areas. In each area, sessions will cover aspects of both design methodology and design tools:

* Business - especially "Management Day" on Tuesday
* Design for Manufacturing
* Embedded Systems
* Logic Design & Test
* Nanometer Analysis and Simulation
* Physical Circuit Design
* Power
* System-Level Design and Verification
* Wireless - especially "Wireless Wednesday"

The DAC 2005 keynote speakers will include:

Bernard Meyerson, IBM Fellow and Vice President and Chief Technologist for the Systems and Technology Group at IBM will discuss: "How Does One Define "Technology" Now That Classical Scaling Is Dead (and Has Been for Years)?" on Tuesday morning.

Ronald Rohrer, Corporate Vice President for Advanced Research and Development at Cadence Design Systems will address: "Innovation in the EDA Business Need Not Be an Oxymoron" on Thursday afternoon.

The DAC Pavillion will include 18 panels and presentations on the exhibit floor. The DAC Pavilion sessions are open to all attendees and feature technical, business and strategy discussions.

In addition there will be full-day tutorials on Monday and Friday for more discussions of technical topics.

Finally, the Workshop for Women in Design Automation (WWINDA) will take place on Monday afternoon.

** HOT Chips 17 – The upcoming conference on August 14th to 16th will be held once again on the lovely campus of Stanford University.

Conference organizers say: "Since it started in 1989, HOT Chips has been known as one of the semiconductor industry's leading conference on high-performance microprocessors and related integrated circuits. The conference is held once a year in August on the Stanford University campus in the center of the world's capital of electronics activity, Silicon Valley. The conference emphasis this year, as in previous years, is on real products and realizable technology."

** ISoC – The 3rd International System-on-Chip Conference and Exhibition will be held November 1st and 2nd in Newport Beach, CA. Organizers say the theme for the conference will be "SoC in Wireless Applications." They also say, "Track & Session presenters, keynote speakers, and panel members who can contribute their professional expertise have a wonderful opportunity to share their innovative SoC technology/products at this event with a very focused and targeted audience."

** ICCAD-2005 will be held at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose from November 6th to the 10th. This is one of the 'real' conferences – real engineering, real science, real stuff. Please note that organizers say that this year, "in addition to traditional CAD topics, ICCAD has expanded its focus to include innovative design technologies for devices, circuits, and systems."