AUGUST 200 8 Dr. Robert K. Brayton, Cadence Distinguished Professor CEDA Standards Committee of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the The Council of EDA Standards Committee (C-EDA SC) University of California at Berkeley, was the 2007 award is to promote the development of Standards in the EDA winner. Prof. Brayton won the Phil Kaufman Award for industry. Such standards are beneficial to the IC design- his demonstrable impact on the field of electronic design ers and developers and users of automation tools in this through contributions in Electronic Design Automation industry since they provide a mechanism for defining (EDA). common semantics. This committee will be represented The Kaufman Award, jointly sponsored by CEDA and by EDA, Consortiums, Semiconductor Companies and the EDA Consortium, honors individuals who have associated standards groups. The C-EDA SC acts as the made a demonstrable impact on the field of EDA in administrator for the Working Groups under it which business, industry direction and promotion, technology develop and maintain Standards. and engineering, or education and mentoring. It was The C-EDA SC is governed by a chairman and a steering established in 1994 in honor of deceased EDA industry committee. The steering committee is composed of the pioneer Phil Kaufman, who turned innovative technolo- chair-persons of the Working Groups under the C-EDA gies like silicon compilation and emulation into business- SC plus explicitly voted in members to include senior es that have benefited electronic designers. management in EDA, representatives from consortiums, Please, visit http://www.edac.org/about_kaufman_award.jsp or representative from DASC and/or other interested par- http://www.ieee-ceda.org/awards. html to download this year’s ties and ex-officio members who may be chosen for the nomination form. sake of continuity or coordination with related groups. The ex-officio members will also include such functions Nanette V. Collins. [email protected] as are required for the effective administration of the C- Overview: International Conference on EDA SC such as secretary. The ex-officio members will be selected by the steering committee. Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). Since this committee is just forming things are changing The International Conference on Computer-Aided De- at a very rapid pace. To keep yourself updated, informa- sign (ICCAD) is the world’s premiere conference in elec- tion will be posted on http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/ceda . tronic design technology and has served EDA and De- sign professionals for the last 25 years by highlighting CEDA has also organized a Panel Session on EDA Stan- new challenges and breakthrough innovative solutions dards for the recent EDP Workshop (Monterey, Califor- for integrated circuit design technologies and systems. nia, April 2008) promoting the initial approaches taken With continued strong participation from around the by the Council. world, including North America, Europe, and Asia, the Please contact Rohit Kapur ( [email protected] ) and ICCAD received nearly 500 technical paper submissions John Darringer ( [email protected] ) for further information. of very high quality. The ICCAD conference will be held on November 10-13 at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Nominations Requested for EDA Indus- Jose, California. try’s Prestigious Kaufman Award “ICCAD continues to be the premiere and most selective Nominations for this year’s recipient of the Phil Kauf- conference devoted to technical innovations in design man Award for Distinguished Contributions to EDA are automation of devices, circuits, and systems,” stated Sani being accepted until Monday, June 30. The award will be Nassif, ICCAD 2008 General Chair. “As the number of presented in October at the 15th annual Phil Kaufman conferences and meeting options for professionals and Award dinner and ceremony in Santa Clara, California. academics continues to grow, ICCAD remains uniquely CEDA Currents is a publication of IEEE CEDA. Please send contributions to Jose L. Ayala, [email protected] or Rajesh Gupta. © 2008 IEEE. All rights reserved. recognized as the place where the most in-depth and come the limits of 2D integrated circuits for carrying ICs respected research work in EDA is presented. This year further along the path of Moore’s Law. Although the we are enhancing ICCAD by offering our global set of concept of 3D integration was originally reported in attendees the option of attending a number of co-located 1980’s, only in recent years, the development of 3D workshops to further drill down in specific areas, and a tiered architectures enabled the creation of vertical inter- strong line-up of keynotes that reflects the future of the connects. The greatest economic advantage of a 3D broader fields of design automation.” tiered architecture is greater yield. It is well-known that smaller chips have a higher yield, or alternatively, a lower Outstanding broadening keynotes defect rate when fabricated. Consequently, a higher yield Such progress comes in the wake of a very successful can be achieved by partitioning a circuit into k smaller 2007 Program that included two extremely well received sub-circuits, each of which will be fabricated and stacked, keynotes from Jeffrey Welser from the Nano-Electronics than building a single larger chip that contains all of the Research Initiative and John Kibarian from PDF Solu- sub-circuits on the same die. tions. Forthcoming electronics systems require the integration This year, ICCAD will host Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of new functionalities in one overall chip, defining the and CEO of Pixel Qi, and formerly the founding chief new design paradigm adopted in the EDA community technology officer of the iconic One Laptop per Child known as System-on-Chip (SoC). As a result, I/Os are (OLPC) project. Ms. Jepsen brings a unique perspective increasing in volume while chip size is decreasing, and of the design of systems in general, and a future vision of new functions are integrated (passives, MEMS, optoelec- the display as computer that will likely drive the future of tronics, RF, etc). As consequence, the conceptual trend is personal electronics. to move from 2D configurations to 3D stacking and then to 3D-ICs to reduce package size, footprint, increase Co-located Workshops Silicon efficiency and have much short interconnects. As the ICCAD ecosystem broadens, and the need for More precisely, the key potential benefits of three 3D- effective technical conferencing and networking soars in ICs that can be identified are the following ones: power our industry, ICCAD has started an initiative to host a reduction, noise and jitter reduction, logical fan-out in- selected number of co-located workshops. These work- crease, performance improvement, functionality en- shops are not only related to the field of automated de- hancement and density increase. sign, but also of the same caliber as the conference itself, As a matter of fact, many different 3D construction me- thereby focusing on quality not quantity. The workshops thods have been proposed, but none of them has reached will leverage the entire conference management infra- the maturity level to achieve its use in forthcoming nano- structure, and allow attendees to add a focused one-day meter scale electronics. In order to allow this novel inte- technical activity with a minimum of disruption to travel gration technology to become a real alternative for the schedules. semiconductor industry, several key challenges need to be As an example of these co-located workshops, there is addressed, which spans from different manufacturing one workshop focusing on Compact Variability Model- aspects to design automation. Thus, a very important ing. The workshop fills a gap between traditional device- collaborative work is needed in the near future between level conferences like the International Electronic Device the manufacturing community for a reliable physical im- Meeting (IEDM) and EDA conferences such as ICCAD plementation and models, Electronic Design Automation since it is widely recognized that process variation is society for CAD algorithms and tools, and finally verifi- emerging as a fundamental challenge to IC design with cation community to provide effective testing mechan- scaled CMOS technology. isms to validate the produced 3D chips for processing and communication architectures of electronic circuits. To learn more, please visit the ICCAD website at www.iccad.com . David Atienza. [email protected] Sani Nassif. [email protected] Upcoming Conferences /Bill Joyner , wi [email protected] Survey on 3D-Silicon Integration PATMOS Lisbon (Portugal), Sept. 10 -12, 2008 Nano -Net Boston (USA), Sept. 15 -17 , 2008 Contributed by Prof. David Atienza (Complutense University of VLSI -SOC Rhodes (Greece), Oct. 13 -15 , 2008 Madrid, Spain) ESWEEK Atlanta (USA), Oct. 19 -24 , 2008 Three dimensional integrated circuits composed of verti- ICCAD San Jose (USA), Nov. 10 -13, 2008 cally stacked active layer circuits allow shorter intercon- FMCAD Portland (USA), November , 2008 nections and hence leads to great possibilities to over- Find us online at www.c -eda.org IEEE COUNCIL ON ELECTRONIC DESIGN AUTOMATION President : JOHN DARRINGER President-Elect : ANDREAS KUEHLMANN www .Secretary ieee-ceda: DAVID . org ATIENZA VP Finance : DONATELLA SCIUTO VP Technical Activities : SOHA HASSOUN 2 VP Conferences : BILL JOYNER VP Publications : RAJESH K GUPTA Administrator : BARBARA WEHNER, [email protected] .