There’s a great and often over-used line out of movie scripts when the hero stumbles upon something that doesn’t make sense and he’s told, “That’s on a need-to-know basis.”

The same seems to be true in low-power engineering. While everyone talks about the need for reducing the power inside of chips, the reality is that only the really advanced SoC and processor companies are taking it seriously. For most other companies, advanced nodes provide plenty of real estate for limiting proximity effects—particularly if there are enough sectors that are in the off state most of the time and there aren’t anywhere near the 100 million gates being packed into smart phone chips.

In any case, there’s always the process technology to bail them out. Low-power processes can and flows can, in fact, save many designs. That will end in 2.5D stacks, which many companies have been advocating as a way of avoiding the headaches of developing new analog IP at each new process node. While they will save NRE costs on the analog side, the physical effects of power will become much more pronounced.

By most accounts we are still at least a year away from commercial introduction of stacked die, and for many companies at least two years. But when the chip market does shift, it will do so with a vengeance and power will be one of the key issues that must be dealt with from the start. For anyone who’s been giving power only passing notice, it’s time to break out the technical papers and start brushing up on these issues. Power isn’t going away, but the jobs of people who don’t recognize its importance could well disappear.

–Ed Sperling

The question I repeatedly get asked at DAC is, “How was the show?” And then, frequently, it’s followed by monologue about just how much traffic has shrunk over the years.

It’s true there are fewer startups than in the past, and maybe some of the tradeshow floor buzz is gone. But in my humble opinion, that misses the point. DAC, first and foremost, is a conference. The tradeshow part, while important to the organizers of DAC and the sales departments of tools companies, is secondary to the engineers who attend the conference—and to those who don’t attend but who view some of the content remotely.

Like all good conferences, it’s not about numbers or sales. It’s about what gets discussed, who’s discussing those ideas, and whether there is any headway in understanding multiple viewpoints that can lead to cross-industry efforts such as standards. And like most of the previous DACs, there were plenty of highly intelligent exchanges that addressed the trouble spots in hardware, software, and the business of both. Those exchanges involved everything from power modeling to 3D stacking, multicore vs. many core, Wide I/O, cloud, ESL, verification and DFM.

This kind of perspective and exchange is critical in a deep technology industry, despite a trend toward single-vendor user conferences. There are many companies that have been blindsided because the shifts in their market weren’t linear—or even from within their core market—and being able to hear opposing ideas is a good thing, no matter how much rival companies tend to bash each other.

The Design Automation Conference is a forum for gathering and sharing ideas. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to hold it in Silicon Valley so more engineers can drive to sessions they consider important instead of getting a second-hand debrief from colleagues who spent an unhappy day in transit. It might even force companies to compete for prime booth space instead of the DAC organizers having to sell it.

But as an idea exchange forum DAC continues to be extremely useful. It even works as a launchpad for new products and new approaches to the market. But trying to measure it from a sales standpoint may make more sense in the context of ideas behind the products rather than the products themselves—and the people who need to understand their value before making a commitment.

–Ed Sperling