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ISQED Luncheon
Sponsored by Synopsys
Tuesday March 18
12:00pm-1:30pm
ISQED Quality Award (IQ Award 2008)
Sponsored by Microsoft Corporation
ISQED Best Paper Awards
Sponsored by Magma Design Automation, and Synopsys
ISQED Committee Awards
Tuesday, March 18
12:45pm-1:30pm
EDA Is Truly Where Electronics Quality Begins!
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Dr. Antun Domic
Senior Vice President & GM, Synopsys, Inc.
The trillion-dollar electronics industry is undoubtedly the fastest growing and most innovative industry in history. Two electronic products which illustrate well the dramatic growth and innovation over the last ten years are the cell phone and the personal computer.
In 1996, cell phones were the third most commonly sold electronic product, after PCs and TVs. That year, the electronics industry sold 60 million cell phones, 65 million PCs, and 120 million TVs worldwide. In 2006, the electronics industry has sold a record one billion cell phones, 230 million PCs, and 180 million TVs. In 1996 a desktop PC running Windows 95 had a minimum system requirement of 33MHz of processor clock rate and 4 MB of memory. In 2006, to be Windows Vista ready, a PC had a minimum system requirement of 1GHz of processor clock rate and 1 GB of memory. From Pentium 5.5 millions of transistors at 350 nanometers to 291 million of Core 2 Duo at 65 nanometers, from 150 MHz to 3.7 GHz, and from 30 Watts to 115 Watts, eight generations of Intel’s processors have happened in approximately 10 years—a new generation every 15 months. Electronic products and their core components, the integrated circuits, innovate at an amazingly, and increasingly rapid, pace, becoming exponentially more complex and feature rich with each new generation introduction. In order to keep up with this brisk pace, the electronics — and semiconductor — industries rely more and more heavily on electronic design automation (EDA) tools. The seemingly insatiable appetite of consumers for more fully featured, higher quality, faster, and yet cheaper electronic products drives the semiconductor industry to produce increasingly smaller, faster, and complex ICs, and drives the EDA industry to produce increasingly ingenious tools to design them. The EDA industry is constantly striving to keep the pace of technology evolution, spending an average 25% of its revenue in research and development, far above the enterprise software and semiconductor industry sectors, even above the pharmaceutical sector, which is often used as a reference point. It provides its customers with always higher quality tools, both in terms of raw performance (capacity, runtime) and additional features required to address the smaller geometries of the newest technology generations. A good example of these tools’ quality improvement is the performance improvement, qualitative and quantitative, undergone by logic synthesis from 1996 until today: in 2007, running the same RTL through logic synthesis not only requires less than half of 1% of the runtime and 3X less memory than it required in 1996, but it also leads to a 40% smaller and 40% faster implementation. In this keynote, like an epic by Virgil, Dr. Domic will guide today's Dantes through the realms of 45 and 32 nanometers, describing the enormous — and yet partly unexplored! — arsenal of weapons that EDA has made, and continues to make, available for the courageous users that are rushing to 45 and 32 nanometers and beyond, as well as for those who decide to stay at 90 and 130 nanometers or higher, also addressing the implications of reduced processor clock rates and the availability of affordable multi-processors.
About Antun Domic
Dr. Antun Domic joined Synopsys in April of 1997. In his current position, Dr. Domic manages the Implementation Group, responsible for Synopsys' flagship synthesis and physical design solutions, test automation, signal integrity, power analysis and timing and formal verification products. Dr. Domic holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Chile.
