The next couple of weeks are frenetic ... DATE, ESC, and PCB West. You can't be everywhere at once. You're going to have to decide ...

** DATE 2005 – Organizers describe the conference – this year taking place in Munich on March 7th to 11th as "Europe's premier conference and exhibition for Electronic Design, Automation and Test offers delegates and visitors the broadest-ever range of information to system designers. The conference addresses research and development activities in the field of design technology and is more and more moving to a system design event focusing on common platform challenges for embedded systems."

The conference will include 400+ presentations, 234 technical conference presentations in seven parallel conference tracks and others in the Executive Track, pre-conference tutorials on the first day, and workshop sessions on the last day of the conference, special days devoted to automotive system design, a PCB symposium, and an enhanced Designers Forum. In addition, organizers say a new feature this year is a 3-day track of submitted papers on Embedded Software.

Please visit the website to see the full extent of events taking place next week in Munich.

** ESC 2005 – The organizers of the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco say this is the 17th annual event, and is taking place March 6th to 10th. The conference is described as "the largest systems design event in North America. ESC San Francisco is one of the few places that bring players in the electronics systems design industry together with the newest technologies." Moscone Center will be buzzing with the usual mega-crowds. You'll probably want to get there.

One panel of interest will be moderated by Dataquest's Daya Nadamuni and will discuss the topic of "Synthesizing Algorithms into Hardware" – the panel will include representatives from CriticalBlue, Synfora, and CoWare and probably should not be missed.

Please visit the website to see the full extent of events taking place next week in San Francisco.

** PCB West 2005 – The conference is taking place March 7th to 11th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Organizers say, "The PCB Design Conferences are the first and only PCB design-oriented conferences developed specifically to meet the needs of PCB engineering, design and manufacture professionals. Our conferences may have been imitated, but they have never been equaled or surpassed. Since 1992, PCB Design Conference West has been expanding the limits of PCB design by providing attendees with quality technical education taught by industry experts, a top-notch product and service exhibition and a wide range of networking opportunities."

This year's keynote is titled: "The Future of the North American PCB Industry." If you think you've got a part in that future, you should be attending the conference.

Please visit the website to see the full extent of events taking place next week in Santa Clara.

** eScape to SystemVerilog Seminars - In the spirit of their Valentine's Day confab at DesignCon, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys say they're presenting a series of "technical seminars that provide guidance to users of Verisity's e language to transition to a standards-based verification methodology built on SystemVerilog … [The] technical seminars will provide practical demonstrations on how users of Verisity's e language can apply SystemVerilog to speed verification and find more bugs, faster."

The seminars are booked into San Jose on March 2nd, into Dallas on March 3rd, and into Boston on March 4th. But, if you miss those, the good times will apparently continue on other dates/venues yet to be specified, elsewhere in North America, Europe, Israel, Japan, Korea, India and Taiwan.

** DAC 2005 Nominations – With an eye to DAC 2005, nominations are being accepted up until March 4th for the Marie R. Pistilli Women in EDA Achievement Award. The DAC Committee says this yearly tribute recognizes individuals who have visibly helped advance women in the EDA industry.

** EDN Magazine's 15th Annual Innovation Awards – The Innovation Awards ceremony and dinner will be held March 7th at the historic Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Organizers say that Geoffrey Orsak, Dean of Southern Methodist University School of Engineering, and Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal's personal-technology columnist will be the featured speakers.

** EE Times ACE Awards Gala will be taking place on Thursday, March 9th, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco – clearly timed to coincide with the Embedded Systems Conference. The evening will include dinner, the awards presentation, and after-dinner entertainment by comedian Richard Jeni. All told, it's described as "a gala industry event celebrating the people, companies and products demonstrating leadership and innovation." Tickets are available for $200 per person, and include dinner, the awards, Jeni, and a pass to the industry "after party" with music, cocktails and dancing.

** Synopsys Interoperability Award – Synopsys announced that nominations for the Tenzing Norgay Interoperability Award are due by March 11th. The motivation behind the award is described in the Press Release:

Tenzing Norgay dedicated 20 years of his life to conquering Mount Everest, a feat that had never been accomplished before and that many believed was impossible. Sir Edmund Hillary is most famous for this accomplishment, but without Norgay's effort, Hillary might not have made it to the summit. Tenzing Norgay was critical to Hillary's successful climb. In a similar way, EDA interoperability is critical to a designer's success.

The Tenzing Norgay Interoperability Achievement Award will be presented to the EDA company whose work to make their products interoperable was critical to designers' success. The Award is presented to the company that:

* Surpasses common levels of interoperability
* Contributes to overall industry advancement
* Provides a new view of the future
* Ensures customer success

The Tenzing Norgay EDA Interoperability Award is presented each June at Synopsys' Interoperability Event at DAC. Previous winners include Novas Software (2004), Silicon Metrics (2003), Mentor Graphics (2002) and CoWare (2001).

** SNUG – Synopsys' 15th annual Users' Group meeting is happening in Santa Clara from March 14th to 16th. The keynote address will be given on February 14th by company CEO and President Aart de Geus. The event will include numerous tutorials and a vendor fair.

** Denali MemCon Taiwan 2005 – Organizers says 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." The event includes a keynote presentation from Pat Hays, MIPS Technologis, and a panel discussion: "Consumer Electronics: The New Era for Memory and Storage" Moderated by: Lane Mason, Memory Market Analyst at Denali Software.

** 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. The next one is in Long Beach, CA on March 16th and will include keynotes from Gartner/Dataquest's Martin Reynolds and Irving Information Group's Larry Irving. Organizers say that each conferences 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!

** ISoC – The 3rd International System-on-Chip Conference and Exhibition is putting out a call for papers. Deadline for submissions is March 20th. The conference 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."

** ISQED 2005 – This will be the 6th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design, and will be happening March 21st to 23rd in San Jose. The topic of this year's meeting will be "Design for Quality in the Era of Uncertainty."

Organizers say the conference is "held in technical sponsorship of IEEE EDS, IEEE CPMT, and in cooperation with IEEE CASS, ACM/sigDA. ISQED is the pioneer and leading conference dealing with design for manufacturability and quality issues, front to back. The ISQED'05 conference spans three days, Monday through Wednesday, in three parallel tracks, hosting near 100 technical presentations, six keynote speakers, two panel discussions, workshops /tutorials and other informal meetings."

** Silicon Design Chain Initiative – The meeting takes place on March 21st at the Cadence Executive Briefing Center in San Jose. Speakers will be coming from Applied Materials, ARM, ARM Physical IP, Cadence, Freescale Semiconductor, and TSMC. There's going to be food and breakout sessions, not necessarily in that order. And the organizers say that "after the event, spokespersons from the partner companies will be available for one-on-one briefings." You should RSVP by March 4th.

** HOT Chips 17 – The Organizing Committees of the HOT Chips conference is inviting one and all to submit papers for consideration for the upcoming conference on August 14th to 16th, being held once again on the lovely campus of Stanford University. The deadline for paper submissions is March 25th, so get cracking.

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."

** 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."

** DAC 2005 – Please put the conference on your calendar right now:

June 13th to the 17th
Anaheim Convention Center

And don't forget: "DAC is the annual event where the electronics design community meets for a week-long forum of information exchange on management practices, products, methodologies and processes. Attended by more than 12,000 developers, designers, researchers, managers and engineers from leading electronics companies and universities worldwide, it offers a robust technical program covering the industry’s hottest trends. Its vibrant exhibit floor includes more than 200 companies, many of whom are startups just introducing their first products. The conference is sponsored by ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design Automation, the Circuits and Systems Society and Computer Aided Network Design Technical Committee of the IEEE, and EDAC."