DATE 2008 - Day 1

While DATE officially started yesterday with a full day of tutorials, today was the first day of the main portion of the conference.  The morning started out with the opening address, awards, and keynotes from Dr. Giovanni De Micheli, Professor and Director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and of the Integrated Systems center at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland (below top) and Dominique Vernay, CTO of Thales in Paris, France (below bottom).

One of the things that caught my attention from Dr. De Micheli's talk was the idea that concepts from the EDA industry could be used in other fields such as Biomedical Engineering. What sorts of things?  Unfortunately, due to a severe attack of jet lag yesterday evening and very little sleep my notes from the keynote are pretty sparse.  If you were at the keynote and can remember some of the specific examples provided please let me know via an email or comment.  I'm pretty sure the examples were related to place and route as well as massively parallel systems, but I know there was more to it than that.

After the keynotes the exhibition floor was open (see the Magma booth below).  I spent part of the morning roaming around checking out the booths before taking leave of the conference in the afternoon for some Verilab business.   I hope to spend more time checking out the vendors and sessions over the next couple of days. 

Comments

[Lou Covey]

I wouldn't worry too much about the bioengineering applications yet. DeGeus made the same statements last year at another event (I think it was DAC) but wasn't clear about specifics. What is becoming clear to the industry is that they need to find another place to sell their wares, so they are making random shots in various directions to see what they might hit.

It's not outside of the realm of possibility, especially since research is being done in several universities around the world, including UC Berkeley, but like the keynote statements, there is nothing substantial to look at.