This year, as part of DAC's 50th celebrations, DAC has organized the DAC Global Forum (DAC-GF). DAC-GF celebrates contributions and plans of nations around the globe to the field of electronic design in past 50 years and in the future. The Global Forum is sponsored by ATIC, the parent company of Global Foundries, an investment vehicle of the Abu Dhabi government.

Countries from around the world at different stages in development of their electronic industries will have exhibits. Countries invited to participate span the globe and include Argentina, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Taiwan, Tunisia, Ukraine and Uruguay. The Global Forum will be on the DAC exhibit floor at booth 137.

Details of the GlobalForum are on the DAC website here.

For 19 years GSA (going back to the days when it was Fabless Semiconductor Association, FSA) has recognized public and private semiconductor companies. The awards are celebrated at a dinner. This year's dinner is on Thursday December 12th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The keynote speaker at the dinner is Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark NJ.

This year for the first time the Thursday of DAC is tranining day. So that would be June 6th in Austin, of course. There are four tracks of training focused on SystemC, ARM Cortex and two on SystemVerilog, all areas of increasing use in SoC design, especially in mobile.

Each track of training is divided into two parts, one held from 9am to 12.30pm, and then a second part from 2pm to 5.30pm. All sessions are taught by a professional educator from Doulos (along with an engineer from ARM for the ARM track) who is the global leader in the development and delivery of training solutions for engineers creating electronic products.

Last night at Cadence was the next installment of what I have been calling Hogan University. Jim interviewed Joe Costello about how to tell a story as part of the EDAC emerging companies series of events. The main focus was how to tell a story as a small EDA company communicating with investors, although there are obviously other forms of communication. I'm assuming that if you are reading the DAC blog that you know that Joe Costello was CEO of Cadence for many years, taking it from its birth as a merger of ECAD and SDA to a big EDA company (I think over $1B by the time he left).

Rather like in his keynote at DAC a few years ago, Joe tried to distill things down into some rules (some of them the same rules even).

This year DAC has keynotes by CEOs of two Austin-based companies Freescale Semiconductor and National Instrument. Two more keynotes (one split into two) are focused on mobile, which has become the major driver of semiconductor today. A fifth keynote, including presentation of the best paper award for DAC 2013, is by Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, who should need no introduction to readers of SemiWiki.

The core of the technical program consists of 158 peer-reviewed papers organized in 34 technical paper sessions, 20 sessions focused on EDA, 10 on embedded systems and 4 specific to system-level design. The total balance is 64% EDA papers and 34% embedded systems and system level papers. Eight papers were selected as best papers candidates.

Papers were selected from 747 submissions, with an acceptance rate of 21%. Among them two perspective papers were selected, focusing on mapping on many/multicore and reliable on-chip systems. Furthermore,  there will be 83 papers presented in dedicated poster sessions as Work in progress.

The most popular submissions topics were: Power analysis and low power design Architectures for embedded systems Physical design and design closure Test and reliability Embedded System Specification and embedded software

The first three topics are the same as last year, while this year there was an increase in interest in test and reliability and embedded systems specification and...