DATE 2007 - April 16-20
April 01, 2007
The Design, Automation and Test in Europe conference is coming up April 16-20 in Nice. For the first time, I'll be attending along with several of my Verilab colleagues to cover some of the interesting events going on that week. I've been given press access again. Apparently the conference organizers didn't see the stuff I wrote about DVCon! The nice thing about press access is that you get into the conference for free. The (potentially) bad thing is that you get on a sort of high-brow spam list where PR firms contact you to interview their clients. I've already received a call (in addition to a few emails) encouraging me to want to interview a few people from companies I haven't heard of working on products that probably aren't interesting from a verification perspective. I also apparently already have an appointment to meet someone, unless I'm busy, of course! Ah well, it's all in good fun in the end.
I haven't been to Nice since I was there on assignment about two years ago, so I plan to take advantage of the trip to catch up with some people I haven't seen in awhile. In fact, if you are planning on attending DATE (whether we've met before or not), let me know! Some of you from the US may be wondering what DATE is. The conference organizers bill DATE as "The ONLY European Event for Electronic System Design and Test". I've gone through the program, and there seem to be vastly more sessions, about a much wider variety of topics than DVCon. I can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I wasn't able to attend all the sessions I wanted to see at DVCon. It was also difficult to decide which ones I wanted to see. This will make things just that much worse. Contrary to popular belief, limitations and restrictions can often be liberating. Many of the sessions are related to specific domain areas, and may be more academic in nature, given many of the presenters seem to have university backgrounds.
Luckily, I'll have help this time around in creating my conference coverage. We're still working on the details, but it looks like we'll have a special DATE blog running over on the Verilab site to contain news and commentary from my colleagues and me. That should free up space on Cool Verification for me to focus more on the commentary side of things. The readers of this blog will be the first to know as soon as I have the details.
One thing I'd be curious to know is what you thought about my DVCon coverage or photos. I've heard good things from people in general, and I got a lot of hits the week during and after the conference, but I'd love to hear feedback from the rest of you lurkers out there. For example, is it worth it for me to lug all of my camera gear to France (ok, trick question, since I'll probably take it anyways!)? Are the details of the sessions interesting, or would your preference be to see more of my thoughtful insight and analysis (or perhaps less of my analysis, or more thought put into my analysis, or more analysis put into my thought)? Perhaps you didn't like the coverage at all and wish I'd go back to writing about Lunchables (seriously – I'm the #8 result if you do a Google search for the term – what gives!)… Anyways, your comments are always appreciated. See you at DATE!