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Musings from ARM TechCon Santa Clara 2015

The first day for exhibitors had lots of foot-traffic. Mostly casual onlookers, but a few who were genuinely interested in Agnisys. Since it was our first foray into ARM TechCon, it was good to meet new set of engineers, different from those we usually meet at other events like DVCon and DAC.

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 Some random notes/observations from the ARM TechCon conference:

  • Many attendees, or at least the ones who swung by our booth, we’re SoC designers/engineers. Not surprising, given the hardware focus of the conference.
  • Demos of gadgets like teardown of a drone, 3-D viewers for phones, etc seemed to be popular. 3D printers, although not really new, were also of interest to many.
  • As for the conference talks I went to, many were well attended 
    1. IoT prototyping by Mediatek –they showed off ease of use by calling/sending text to an attendee using their development board.
    2. Case study of optimizing GPU performance on mobile platform

One of the recurring themes at all such conferences is the engineer’s interest to improve their design tools and process. Two areas resonated with us – overall chip development and back-end chip validation. Specifically, among the visitors there was a lot of interest around SoC development. I gave a sneak peek to the visitors on some of the new technology that we are working on for SoC creation. We appreciate all the suggestions we got from a different perspective. 

Many visitors pointed out the pain point around IP and SoC validation. We were able to have a good discussion on the gap between verification and validation – one that we are eagerly working to fill.

We are hoping to see many more of you at DVCon San Jose 2016 where we unwrap our new tools in this space.

ic designer's guide to automating design through implementation of semiconductors