This year’s DesignCon attracted 130 exhibiting companies, more than 300 speakers, daily keynotes, eight technical panels, a business forum, more than 100 technical papers and forums, 13 technical tracks, and a signal integrity workshop.

The event is aimed at the world of electronic design professionals, drawing in designers, IC fabricators, suppliers of design tools and test devices, OEMs, academics, electronic packagers, and material suppliers. The aging native designers in attendance, who were born, raised, and educated in the U.S. and acquired their skills at IBM, HP, Cisco, AT&T, or Sun, still field a strong contingent, but this balding, pony-tailed bunch seems to be fading away.

Hot Topics Abound in Keynotes and Technical Sessions

Several technical hot topics dominated the discussions: heat management of high-performance processors, power leakage, power supply, management and distribution, equalization techniques, intellectual property strategies, passive component integration, and cost-effective functional verification.

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Steve Polzin, AMD senior fellow and chief platform architect, described in his keynote speech the transition from single-core processors to dual-, quad-, and multiple-core processors that outperform single-core processors while requiring less power. Like everything in life, such advantages don’t come free. Multi-core architectures require many more I/Os (terminations) on the chip and package, so finer redistribution (or fan-out) circuitry is required in the flip chip substrates.

Willem P. Roelandts, Xilinx president, CEO, and chairman of the board, explained the developments in the field of programmable logic and how this technology is finding new areas of application. He reviewed the last major waves of innovation in electronics, the last one being the Internet, which is still expanding at a breathtaking pace, and he is seeing the next wave in the form of a “triple convergence” of data, voice, and video.

Prof. Leah Jamieson, John A. Edwardson, dean of engineering, College of Engineering at Purdue University, addressed the issues of U.S. engineering education. There is a declining interest in engineering and science among high school students, and minorities and women are still under-represented in engineering, while the number of engineering graduates in India and China is growing enormously. An interesting but alarming find is the fact that the engineering know-how as taught today at our universities has a useful “half-time life” of only five years, pointing to the need of understanding which engineering skills remain useful over a longer time and to the need for lifelong learning. “Engineering in 2020” predicts the needed skill sets: While fundamental understanding of engineering principles, math, and tools remains essential, attributes such as entrepreneurship, team working, leadership, and flexibility will become exponentially more important.

Ann Steffora Mutschler, Electronic News and Electronic Business senior editor, led a spirited plenary panel discussion on “Why Are We Still Designing Like It’s 1992?” There were healthy disagreements between panel members, but the prevailing opinion appeared to suggest that there had been improvements in design tools so that more complex designs can be mastered; however, the fundamental methodology had not changed much, especially the tedious verification methods.

Exhibit Hall Features Leading PCB Technologies

The exhibit was subdivided into four major segments: Semiconductor and IP Technology, Verification Technology, Test and Measurement, and PCB Technology. The PCB Technology hall dealt mostly with PCB design issues, but fabricators, such as Sanmina, Coretec, and Merix, showed their technology advancements. Merix emphasized its efforts in diversifying its product portfolio. Sanmina emphasized its breadth of technology: Dk and Df studies for advanced signal integrity boards, the substitution of Dicy-cured FR-4 materials with phenolic-cured base materials that are compatible with lead-free processing, back-drilling PTHs on large backplanes, the use of blind and buried vias, and the optimization of via interconnects for improved signal integrity.

Rogers, Taconic, and Gore touted their high-speed digital and RF materials.