Design Automation Conference

The Design Automation Conference (DAC - The chips to systems conference) is an annual event that combines a technical conference with a trade show. It focuses on semiconductor and electronic system design, covering topics such as electronic design automation (EDA), artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and AI-driven algorithms for hardware design, system on chip (SoC) architecture, low-power electronics, design for manufacturability (DFM), hardware security, physical design, IP cores, chiplets, and embedded systems.

Program

In 2024 DAC received 1545 research paper submissions. A technical program committee of 266 domain experts performed a double-blind review, selecting 337 papers (22%) for publication in the proceedings.

DAC also includes an Engineering Track for industry professionals and technical managers. This track addresses front-end design, back-end design, IP, and embedded systems and software. Submissions to the Engineering Track undergo a separate peer-review process conducted by a dedicated committee.

The trade show features approximately 100 companies in the field of design automation such as Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys, Siemens EDA and Ansys.

The DAC Young Fellows Program is an initiative aimed at supporting and inspiring graduate students and early-career researchers. The program provides approximately 150 participants with mentorship, travel grants, networking opportunities, and access to conference sessions, fostering their professional growth and encouraging engagement with the DAC community.

The Ph.D. Forum at DAC is a poster session for Ph.D. students to present and discuss their dissertation research with the EDA community.

HACK@DAC is a hardware security challenge contest for finding and exploiting security-critical vulnerabilities in hardware and firmware.

DAC is organized by hundreds of volunteer committee members from industry and academia. The conference is sponsored by two professional societies:

ACM-SIGDA (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Design Automation) and
IEEE-CEDA (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation), in technical cooperation with IEEE-SSCS (IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society).

The conference is usually held in June.

Origins

DAC is the oldest and largest conference in EDA, starting in 1964. It grew out of the SHARE ("Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort") design automation workshop. Its originators Marie Pistilli and Pasquale (Pat) Pistilli were honored by the EDA community. Pat received the highest honor in EDA industry, the Phil Kaufman Award, for this effort, and Marie was honored by having an award established in her name, the Marie Pistilli Award.

Up until the mid-'70s, DAC had sessions on all types of design automation, including mechanical and architectural. After that, for all intents and purposes, the focus shifted to electronic design. Currently, the topics at DAC also include embedded systems, autonomous systems, Artificial Intelligence hardware, hardware security, and Intellectual Property.

Also until the mid-'70s, DAC was strictly a technical conference. Then a few companies started to request space to show their products, and within a few years, the trade show portion of DAC became the main focus of the event. The first commercial DAC was held in June 1984. As a rough metric of the importance of the trade show portion, about 6,300 people attended DAC in 2018, whereas ICCAD, at least as strong technically but with no trade show, drew perhaps a tenth as many attendees.