New this week – the EDAC CEO Panel, the participants on John Cooley's Executive Panel at DVCon, this month's Software Developers forum, and pending deadlines for HOT Chips papers and nominations for the Synopsys Interoperability Award...

** IEEE ISSCC 2005 – The International Solid-State Circuits Conference, as the companion conference to IEDM last December, is described by the organizers as "the foremost global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and Systems-on-a-Chip. The Conference offers a unique opportunity for engineers working at the cutting edge of IC design to maintain technical currency, and to network with leading experts."

ISSCC is taking place from February 6th to 10th at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel. If you're working at the cutting edge, attendance should be required.

** DVCon 2005 – Organizers says the conference, which is taking place February 14th to 16th at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose, will include valuable information for design and verification engineers, EDA professionals, university researchers, and industry leaders.

Program highlights will include a keynote from Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines, and four sponsored tutorials covering:

* "SystemVerilog Assertions: Best Practices for Functional Verification" – sponsored by Synopsys
* "Pragmatic ABV: Effective Assertion-Based Verification" – sponsored by Cadence
* "Transitioning to SystemVerilog for Verification" – sponsored by Mentor Graphics
* "Transaction-Level Modeling with the New OSCI SystemC TLM Standard" – also sponsored by Cadence

Meanwhile, nobody's going to miss John Cooley's Panel of EDA Executives chatting about every little thing on Tuesday, the 15th, at 4:30 PM ... an event that always turns out to be the social event of the season. John is currently requesting that his loyal ESNUG readers submit (tough) questions for him to throw at the panel during the event.

The panel will include:

Magma's Rajeev Madhavan
Verisity's Moshe Gavrielov
Sierra's Pravin Madhani
Forte's Jacob Jacobsson
Synopsys' Antun Domic
Mentor Graphics' Robert Hum
Cadence's Ted Vucurevich
Gartner/Dataquest's Gary Smith

** SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series – This month's speaker, appearing on February 17th at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, will be Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python scripting language. Organizers say, "Python is one of a handful of scripting languages that was architected in advance to become something big and powerful, while simple to use, as opposed to little languages that have grown big and convoluted through accretion. It can be used for little tasks and for building complex applications." Should be worth hearing indeed!

** EDAC CEO Forecast – The EDA Consortium hosts this annual panel discussion where the CEOs of the leading EDA companies can share their impressions of the business outlook for the coming year. This year's moderator will be prominent industry analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer from Merrill Lynch. His panel members will include:

Aart de Geus, Synopsys
Jim Douglas, Reshape
Mike Fister, Cadence
Wally Rhines, Mentor Graphics
Chris Rowen, Tensilica
Sanjay Srivastava, Denali Software

You should plan to be there by 6 PM for cocktails and 7 PM for the panel discussion on Thursday, February 24th, at the HP facilities – 3000 Hanover Street in Palo Alto. But before going, you should register on the EDAC website.

** 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.

Per the Press Release: "To be considered, the nominee should show leadership for the launch of a successful product that included contributions from women or a program that has created opportunities for women. Or, the nominee could be the leader of a company or organization that has helped raise the awareness of women or has been a mentor or role model for successful women. The award, named for the former organizer of the DAC is open to both males and females with technical or non-technical backgrounds in industry or academia. Last year's winner was Dr. Mary Jane Irwin who holds the title of the A. Robert Noll chair in the Department of Computer Science at Pennsylvania State University."

** 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 Emerica. 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.

** 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.

** 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 devloted 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.

** 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.

** 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).

** 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."

** 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."

** DAC 2005 – Speaking of DAC, 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."

You and I know, we'll all be there!