There are many reasons to attend DATE09: a high quality and relevant programme with lots of technical sessions, outstanding keynotes, executive panels, tutorials, an extensive exhibition program and much more.  There is one aspect I think makes DATE unique which is two Special Days focussing on domains of crucial importance for the future of our industry.  These two specialised days provide clear focus and guidance provided by industry and academic leaders.

Special Day on SoC Development Strategies

Organised by Yervant Zorian and Lorena Anghel, this special day will focus on the new challenges, trends and development strategies in SoC design.  Experts from IDMs and fabless companies, suppliers and service providers will join together and share their experience and contributions on several hot topics: SoC development trade-offs, concurrent SoC development and end-to-end planning, vertical integration vs disaggregation, multisourcing and the role of standardisation.

In his lunch-time keynote Pierre Garnier, General Manager of Texas Instruments Semiconductor Group, will focus on wireless application processors enabling multimedia-rich wireless services to end-customers. Mentor´s CEO Wally Rhines chairs a panel discussing electronic system level methodology for SoC design, including power issues. The growing complexity of SoC design and manufacturing leads to a discussion of vertical integration versus disaggregation moderated by Peggy Aycinena. A Hot Topic session with three talks on concurrent SoC development and end-to-end planning covers the overlap and the required interaction between various engineering disciplines. Finally, architectures and integration for programmable SoC´s will be discussed by a panel, including the reality in today's designs.

Special Day on Multicore Applications

Organised by Ahmed Jerraya and Pieter van der Wolf, this special day focuses on multicore systems HW and SW architectures and target applications. Today, multicore architectures are deployed in various application domains for building high-performance computing platforms in advanced process technologies. This has been enabled by a broad range of innovations in hardware architectures, software architectures, programming paradigms and design methods. As future process technologies will enable further integration, new challenges will arise for defining the (homogeneous and heterogeneous) multicore architectures of future computing platforms, employing sophisticated interconnect and memory subsystems. New software architectures, design methods and programming paradigms will be needed to manage the complexity of developing and programming these platforms.

This special day starts with an embedded tutorial to introduce the key technologies required to build multicore applications. In his lunch-time keynote Eric Flamand, Head of Computing Division at STMicroelectronics, outlines strategic directions and market trends. He will show that we will see the emergence of a new generation of standard mega cells that can be assembled as homogeneous many cores fabrics as an alternative to today's heterogeneous SoCs. A panel session will discuss whether start-ups will drive innovation in the multicore domain and whether multicore solutions will replace a large part of FPGA and ASIC products for the embedded system market. The panel will present the most promising products and solutions and discuss the winning strategy to market. Two additional sessions will contain presentations and discussions how multicore technologies are applied for different application domains.

Looking forward to seeing you at DATE 2009 in Nice!

Visit these links and view the detailed DATE 09 technical programme:

Conference - www.date-conference.com/date09/group/date/session-list
Special Day on SoC Development Strategies - www.dateconference.com/date09/conference/date09-wednesday-special-day
Special Day on Multicore Applications - www.date-conference.com/date09/conference/date09-thursday-special-day