commbasics

Couple days ago I asked for some help in figuring out the DAC numbers and one of my readers let me to an article by Kevin Morris at the FPGA Journal about the same thing, but getting into the discrepancies with much more depth.  Answered all of my questions (thanks Kevin) and like I thought, it took an engineer. But far into the article, Kevin said something very insightful: " EDA has ignored the majority of electronic designers in the world - who are not doing ASIC/SoC design. Probably 95% or more of the people designing electronic systems in the world today are not designing ASICs, but are instead using FPGAs and commodity processors on custom circuit boards. With a few exceptions - EDA has not invested heavily in serving this 95%, but has instead put the bulk of their development resources into supporting the high-flying 5% doing nanometer IC design." He was making the point that if trade shows and conferences like DAC, DVCon, DATE, etc. are going to survive they hav...

This week, John Cooley published an email I sent him regarding DATE on Deep Chip and stirred up a load.   The bottom line is I said I heard that the Design Automation and Test Exposition (DATE)  was not long for this world.  This is based on what I was told a couple of years ago when EDA Ltd. was bought by TechInsights.  TechInsights decided they did not want DATE, so they allowed EDA Ltd employees to take it over, including the binding contracts with Munich and Nice in 08 and 09, and see if they could make a go of it.  Well the report from Nice was that DATE had a 47 percent drop in attendance from 2008.  This was the second straight year of decline. My statement was a response to Cooley's previous report outlining the decline.  Before I wrote to John, I visited the DATE website where it had a headline. DATE'09 conference was a huge success I thought it was a weird headline considering what John had reported on the attendance, so I thre...

OK, the speculation is off and running.  Have received three separate reports from attendees at DATE 2009 in Nice,  France that state the attendance, minus exhibitors, is under 1,000 with more than three-quarters from universities.  So with about 25 exhibiting companies, down from 168 last year, it looks like DATE and DVCon are about equal this year.  Last year and the year before, total attendance was 4700. The question is, however, how many attendees were coming for DATE and how many for the ARTEMSIA conference, co-located with DATE? Looking forward to the official numbers.