The 26th Conference on VLSI Design will be in Pune, India from January 5th to 10th at the Hyatt Regency. Details on the conference here. Registration here.

I happened to be involved in the first of these conferences, which was held in Edinburgh where I was wrapping up my PhD. It was in the considerably less palatial surroundings of the University's Appleton Tower before it was modernized and the conference was run on a shoe-string. We would have been surprised to have a time-traveler come back and tell us that the conference would still be going in 2013 and perhaps even more surprised that it would be in India which wasn't exactly a force in VLSI Design back then, although to be fair nowhere really was at that point. It was the beginning of the Mead-Conway revolution when VLSI Design stopped being an arcane art held only inside semiconductor companies and computer scientists and EE departments started to teach and research design and design automation. EDIT: Grant Martin has pointed out to me that I'm mixing up two conferences, VLSI in India and the VLSI conference that is now VLSI-SoC (the next one is in Istanbul next October).

By the way, I love the way the sessions are called "pre-lunch", "post-lunch" and "post-afternoon-tea". Bit like a cricket test match (which, for Americans and others who are totally bemused by cricket, takes place over 5 days with meal breaks...makes baseball seem like a blink of an eye).

Most of the time there are 6 parallel sessions so there are obviously a large number of papers being presented.

In addition there are 9 keynotes:

• Abhi Talwalkar, President & CEO LSI Corp. Intelligent Silicon in the Data-centric Era
• Dr. Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow Thomas J Watson Research Center, Opportunities and Challenges for High Performance Microprocessor Designs and Design Automation
• Dr. Paramesh Gopi , President and Chief Executive Officer, APM
• Kishore Manghnani, Vice President of Communications and Consumer Business, Marvell
• Lou Scheffer, JFRC Fellow Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Deciphering the brain, cousin to the chip
• Vivek K. Singh, Intel Fellow, Technology and Manufacturing Group, Duniyaa Maange Moore!
• Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Professor Penn State, Embedded Vision Systems
• Venkat Rajaraman, CEO Solaris, Electronics Backbone of Renewable Energy Industry
• T. R. Ramachandran , VP - Corporate Quality and Programs LSI, Green Electronics & Sustainability – Key Business Imperatives for the 21st Century