DAC is expanding its program in memory of Richard Newton to assist young students to attend DAC. Since DAC is the biggest and most important conference in EDA, it is important that students working in the area come to DAC and are not prevented from doing so by financial constraints. DAC mitigates these financial limitations by providing partial support for the expenses of attending DAC. In addition, DAC sponsors various activities during DAC that ensure that the fellows have a richer experience and interact closely with the EDA community.

DAC has expanded the program and, this year, has set aside grants for approximately 80 fellows (the exact number will depend partially on the actual travel costs). The program is open to students at all levels from junior and senior undergraduates, through master's students, up to pre-candidacy PhD students.

I was at DesignCon in Santa Clara today and listened to Jonah Alben of NVIDIA's keynote on what their approach is to improving design methodology. He started by pointing out that most companies underinvest in EDA (and he includes NVIDIA in this). Partially it is complaceny: that last chip taped out so we know we can do it again. Partially it is getting used to the quirks of the methodology: we don't want to change. And partially it is a tradeoff since people working on methodology are not working directly on the product.

The Austin area is famous for great barbecue. But you used to need a car (and a lot of time) to really experience the best and make your road trips to Lexington, Lockhart, Luling, Llano, and more. But now there is Franklin Barbecue in downtown Austin. it is at 900 East 11th Street which is a 20 minute walk from the convention center (work up an appetite). They open at 11am but you can expect lines. They stop serving when they run out of food which is around 1pm.

My son was recently sent to Austin to help open an office there. He said it is far and away the best barbecue he's ever had but you really do need to be prepared to wait an hour to get it. The line starts at 9am and can be hundreds of people long. Make sure to say it is your first time there and if you are lucky they'll give you samples of all the other stuff you didn't order. To make sure you come back next time.

Semico Research recently published a detailed forecast and analysis of the analog market. But the headline numbers are publicly available. The analog market totaled $40B in revenue in 2012 and is expected to grow by 9.5% in dollar value and 6.4% in unit growth into 2013.  That is a healthy chunk of the whole semiconductor market, especially since it excludes all the mixed-signal SoCs which are primarily digital chips that contain some on-chip analog IP.

DesignCon 2013 is January 28th-31st at the Santa Clara Convention Center. There is a full conference program and also exhibits (just on 29-30th). The detailed schedule for all the conference tracks is here.

There are 3 keynotes:

• Monday from 12.30 to 1pm Bill Swift, VP Engineering at Cisco.
• Tuesday from 12 to 12.30 Jonah Alben, Senior VP Engineering at NVIDIA
• Wednesday from 12 to 12.30 Mike Santori, Business and Technology Fellow at Texas Instruments

Registration for DesignCon is here.