Week 40: Look Who’s Talking

I have to admit I feel like a child bursting with excitement to announce our designer keynote for Monday’s opening session at DAC. Brian Otis from Google will give a talk entitled, “Google Smart Lens: IC Design and Beyond.” The project made news last summer with the announcement of a licensing deal between Google and Novartis to develop technology to help manage diabetes. It will be great to get an update directly from Brian, who by the way is also an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Check out his citations on Google Scholar to get a flavor of his published work.

By now you all know (at least those who read my blogs) that we are having quite the year at DAC. We’ve received record submissions to the research, designer and IP tracks, along with a huge increase in embedded submissions. The conference will feature lots of super-relevant information on automotive, security, IoT and IP. And the stellar lineup of SKY talks and keynotes, including Brian’s, is a sure sign that the tech community is eager and motivated to support the EDA industry’s premier event.

Brian’s title alone should be enough to motivate you to sign up for “I Love DAC” pre-registration, which provides free three-day exhibit passes, courtesy of our sponsors. Though if you need more urging, check out his abstract:

We have amazingly sparse access to information about our own bodies. Indeed, the healthier we are, the less data we collect. Technologies to continually monitor critical biomarkers are still in their infancy, but continuing advances in chip design and biocompatible system integration will help define the next generation of these devices. Against the backdrop of the Google Smart Contact Lens platform, I’ll share thoughts on the scarcity of power, extreme miniaturization, and end-to-end connected systems that span the design space from transistors to the cloud. Along the way, I’ll cover chip design techniques for body-worn systems and wireless sensors and present examples of constantly-connected devices for improving healthcare. These areas present tough unsolved problems at the interface between the IC and the outside world that cannot be solved by transistor technology scaling alone. The interface between silicon and the human body is highly variable, erratic, and messy. This unpredictability impacts sensor performance, RF/electromagnetic performance, system reliability, tolerability and comfort, etc. Several future applications will demand thin-film realization and biocompatibility of complex systems. Novel power sources, low power IC design techniques, microscale user interface technologies, and new system integration techniques will be a few of the enabling technologies for these emerging systems.

This week we are opening up early registration for “I Love DAC,” which among other benefits will allow you to attend all our exhibits, SKYtalks, Keynotes and Designer Track Poster sessions all three days for free. (Look for more “I Love DAC” registration details on DAC.com this Friday.) You don’t want to be the one that missed Brian Otis, Jeffrey Owens, Jeffrey Massimilla and Craig Smith, and John Rogers. It is an amazing lineup. Advanced registration for the conference opens March 26. I’m looking forward to a record year in early registration numbers. Please don’t let me down.