Evening Panel Discussion

Monday March 26, 2007

6:30pm-8:30pm

DFM:

EDA's Salvation or it's Excuse for being out of touch with engineering?

Moderator

Resve Saleh , ECE Dept UBC Vancouver

Organizer

Pallab Chatterjee, SiliconMap

Description

DFM/DFY has been recently touted as the high growth salvation of the EDA industry and it future direction.  At present, DFM is heavily focused on the POST data creation correction of design data in a primitive level soft IP based SOC flow.  The reality of the semiconductor community is they are shifting to a yield predictable, systems based hard mega-cell IP based SOC flow.  This shift relies on a high degree of core competency by the design engineering community that has been systematically suppressed & abstracted by the EDA community.  As a result, this panel will discuss if DFM is really a new problem or just a new label that permits EDA to charge more than what would be expected for a process node update due to a lack of engineering re-education?  Additionally, if DFM really IS a new type of challenge, do we need to and can we afford to re-educate design engineers as to how IC must be done at the latest process generations while simultaneously shifting the core of the semiconductor industry and not have the whole thing collapse?

Panelists:

Robert Dobkins – CTO, Linear Technologies Corp

Ivan Pesic – CEO/Founder, Silvaco Data Systems

Ken Rygler – CEO, Rygler Associates

Juan, Rey, Sr. Engineering Director, Mentor Graphics Corp

Naveed Sherwani – CEO/Founder, Open Silicon 

Michael Smayling – Sr VP, TelaInnovations, Inc.