Week 49: Are We There Yet?

When I was a little kid my parents would pack me and my sister into the car and drive to the Mediterranean for our summer camping vacation. It was quite a haul from our home on the west side of Germany near the border with Belgium to the south of France, and as is true of any long car trip, the last stretch was the hardest. After hours in the backseat, my sister and I would be craning our necks, competing to be the first to see the sparkling Mediterranean Sea while constantly pestering my parents with, “Are we there yet?” and “I see it! I see it!” false alarms.

I’m feeling a bit of the same restless anticipation now, and in fact I hope you might be as well. DAC is just over the horizon. While most of the key mileposts are in the rearview mirror, an important one lies just ahead. Early registration for the conference is ending this week though you have until May 19 to register your free I Love DAC pass.

Of course you can register at on-site rates through June 11. If a full-conference registration doesn’t make sense for you, please consider registering for the Designer and IP track. (See all you get access to under the “Designer Special” column here.) At just $95, this track is an incredible deal for designer-to-designer content, stripped of the pesky influence of marketing departments. Most of the sessions not only sound geeky, but are geeky — the highest praise. I wrote down session titles a few for you:

New Chips on the Block
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Real Designers Have Strong Methodologies
Planar to FinFET
Signoff Like Clock Work: Clock In, Sign Out!

You have to admit, they sound pretty interesting. I also took a look at some of the companies represented by the speakers:

Altera, AMD, Avago, Broadcom, Freescale, Huawei, IBM, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, Qualcomm, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Samsung and more. So, consider attending both for the great material and the stellar networking opportunities. You’ll have ample access to both, including at a special poster session just for the designer and IP track attendees Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. on the exhibit floor. This session is open to everyone though is intended to foster those community ties for those who are serious about design.

As it happens, the distance from my current home of Portland to San Francisco is about the same as that covered in my family’s annual drives south through Europe so many years ago. Of course I’ll be flying down the west coast in a few weeks — no time for any Shrek-type road trip — but that hasn’t stopped me from looking ahead. There’s an ocean of great content and networking waiting for us. Of course I’ll be flying down the West Coast in a few weeks — no time for any Shrek-type road trip — but that hasn’t stopped me from looking ahead. There’s an ocean of great content and networking waiting for us.

Register today at www.dac.com.