SAN JOSE, Calif. — Called a first-of-its-kind conference by organizers, the IEEE's International Symposium on the Quality of Electronic Design (ISQED) will explore the increasingly important issue of design quality. Scheduled for March 20-22 in San Jose, Calif., the ISQED program includes a number of technical papers and panels, plus two plenary sessions.
Conference organizer Ali Iramanesh, senior director of engineering at Synopsys Inc., said he convened the conference because of concern over the rising costs of quality problems, and the increasing importance of designing for reliability and of semiconductor yields as design complexity grows.
ISQED will include participants from the design, EDA, semiconductor, and manufacturing communities. Technical sessions will explore such issues as low-power test, emerging process and device technologies, EDA tool quality, metrics for quality, signal integrity, design for manufacturability, and capacitive/inductive coupling issues.
The conference will include three day-long tutorial tracks: "design for reliability and manufacturability;" "design for quality;" and "closing the manufacturing loop." A Monday (March 20) evening panel will probe the question, "How do you select a high-quality EDA tool flow?"
A plenary session on Tuesday will begin with a keynote speech by Aart de Geus, chairman and chief executive officer of Synopsys, who will speak on the role of quality. Other speakers in the plenary session include John East, president and chief executive of Actel Corp.; Prakash Agrawal, president and chief executive of NeoMagic; and John Kibarian, president and chief executive of PDF Solutions.
A Tuesday afternoon panel asks the question, "What is design quality?" At a Tuesday evening reception sponsored by EE Times, a panel will analyze "The hidden costs of design quality."
The Wednesday plenary session includes talks by Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley; Yervant Zorian, chief technology advisor for LogicVision; and Kamran Eshraghian, a professor at Edith Cowan University.
Wednesday panels probe further into design quality questions. One is titled, "Focus on quality of design: does it help or hinder time-to-market?" The other is entitled, "Design-manufacturing interface in the deep-submicron era: Is technology-independent design dead?"
A poster session includes some 19 papers, mostly from academic sources. Topics include clock tree design, antenna problems, testability of domino logic, signal routability, electromagnetic interference, shielding for dynamic circuits, and the OpenMore assessment program for silicon intellectual property.
