DAC 2024

The premier event for the design and design automation of electronic chips to systems.

Autonomous Systems

Electronics content in modern autonomous systems (e.g., automotive, robotics, drones, etc.) is growing at an increasingly rapid pace. Nearly every aspect of these complex systems uses smart electronics and embedded software to make our experiences safer, more energy-efficient and enjoyable. For example, premium vehicles can have several million lines of embedded software code running on hundreds of electronic control units. Within autonomous systems, such as automotive, these sub systems connect with one another by in-system networks. As the trend towards fully autonomous driving and connectivity accelerates, the ability to deliver these innovations depends more than ever on advanced electronics and software development.

Design

DAC has served as a meeting place for designers of electronic systems and providers of electronic design automation tools for over five decades. Increasingly, the challenges faced by the industry require cross-domain interaction of researchers and practitioners working on electronic design (circuit, architecture, and embedded systems design) and researchers working on design methodologies and tools. DAC serves this need by covering design as a topic area in the research track, in addition to organizing a dedicated designer track for practitioners.

The design topics covered in the research track include the design of cyber-physical, SoC architectures, accelerator-based computing, emerging models of computation such as brain-inspired and quantum computing, digital and analog circuits, and emerging device technologies.

Separately the Designer Track allows tool users to share challenges and benefits of different tools, flows, and methodologies. In addition, it provides excellent opportunities for education and networking between end users and tool developers. There is no other way to improve your “design IQ” in such a short amount of time than to attend the Designer Track.

Electronic Design Automation

EDA (Electronics Design Automation) is becoming ever more important with the continuous scaling of semiconductor devices and the growing complexities of their use in circuits and systems. Demands for lower-power, higher-reliability and more agile electronic systems raise new challenges to both design and design automation of such systems. For the past five decades, the primary focus of research track at DAC has been to showcase leading-edge research and practice in tools and methodologies for the design of circuits and systems.

In addition to the traditional EDA topics ranges from physical design to system architectures, DAC features high-quality papers on design research, design practices, and design automation for cross-cutting topics including low-power, reliability, multicore/application specific/heterogeneous architectures, 3-D integrations, emerging device technologies, design automation of “things”, and their applications. DAC’s EDA technical program has been ensuring the best-in-class solutions that promise to advance EDA.

Embedded Systems & Software (ESS)

Embedded system design is the art of choosing and designing the proper combination of hardware and software components to achieve system level design goals like speed, efficiency, reliability, security, and safety. Embedded systems are an increasingly diverse, disruptive, and challenging field for designs ranging from mobile devices, medical devices, automotive, robotics, drones, industrial and beyond. Embedded software is built into devices that may not necessarily be recognized as computing devices (e.g., thermostats, toys, defibrillators, and anti-lock brakes), but nevertheless controls the functionality and perceived quality of these devices.

The ESS sessions at DAC provide a forum for discussing the challenges of embedded design and an opportunity for leaders in the industry and academia to come together to exchange ideas and roadmaps for the future for this rapidly expanding area.

AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) program highlights the advances in the field with a focus on design and design automation at the cross section between AI algorithms and hardware. While artificial intelligence and artificial neural network research has been ongoing for more than half a century, recent advances in accelerating the pace and scale of machine learning enabled by tensor-flow based gradient optimization in deeply layered convolutional networks (convnets) are revolutionizing the impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our daily lives, ranging from smart consumer electronics and services to self-navigating cars and personalized medicine.

The advances in deep learning are fueled by computing architectures tailored to the distributed nature of learning and inference in neural networks, akin to the distributed nature of neural information processing and synaptic plasticity in the biological brain. Neuromorphic brain-inspired electronics for AI aim at porting the brain’s efficacy, efficiency, and resilience to noise and variability to electronic equivalents in standard CMOS and emerging technologies, offering new design challenges and opportunities to advance computing architecture beyond Moore’s law scaling limits.

The AI sessions at DAC focuses on the fundamentals, accomplishments to date, and challenges ahead in ML/AI hardware system design and design automation, providing a forum for researchers and practitioners across all the widely varying disciplines involved to connect, engage, and join in shaping the future of this exciting field.

IP

Intellectual Property (IP) is increasingly complex, diverse, innovative, and challenging. The complexity is driven by increasing requirements for higher integration levels that are reusable; the diversity to satisfy varying environmental conditions and constraints dictated by the different target markets. In addition, the evolution of IP is being driven by innovative architectures to address the latency-power-performance needs of new disruptive applications, such as machine learning.  The IP challenges are to cope with the complexities of advanced technology nodes.

IP design is the art of choosing and designing the proper combination of analog, digital, RF hardware and software components to achieve sub-system-level design goals like speed, power, latency, efficiency, reliability, security, and safety. EDA tools, automation and methods are continuously improved to help architect, develop, verify and manage the ever more complex IP and IP portfolios.

The IP Track sessions at DAC provides a forum for presenting and discussing the challenges of IP development, verification, integration and management.  It also provides an opportunity for leaders in the industry and academia to come together to exchange ideas and roadmaps for the future for this rapidly expanding area.

Design on Cloud

Systems and semiconductor companies realize the benefits of the cloud and how designing in the cloud can greatly accelerate their design cycle. Semiconductor design simulation, verification, lithography, metrology, yield analysis, and many other workloads benefit from the scalability and performance of cloud design.

For all aspects of semiconductor design and manufacturing, the new era of design in the cloud, can optimize the process and increase yields. Industrial IoT, data lake, analytics, and machine learning solutions allow you to develop smart factories and products, provide insights to increase your operational efficiency, and accelerate your pace of innovation.

The Design on Cloud sessions will focus on the aspects mentioned above plus high performance design, verification, and smart manufacturing, supporting electronic design automation (EDA) in the cloud.

Security

Security sessions at DAC address an urgent need to create, analyze, evaluate, and improve the hardware, embedded systems and software base of the contemporary security solutions. Secure and trustworthy software and hardware components, platforms and supply chains are vital to all domains including financial, healthcare, transportation, and energy. Security of systems is becoming equally important. A revolution is underway in many industries that are “connecting the unconnected”.

Cyber physical systems, e.g., automobiles, smart grid, medical devices, etc., are taking advantage of integration of physical systems with the information systems. Not withstanding the numerous benefits, these systems are appealing targets of attacks. Attacks on the cyber-part of such systems can have disastrous consequences in the physical world. The scope and variety of attacks on these systems present design challenges that span embedded hardware, software, networking, and system design.

Security topics will be featured through invited special sessions, panels, and lecture/poster presentations by both practitioners and researchers to share their knowledge and experience on this evolving environment.