The PhD forum is hosted by the European Design Automation Association (EDAA), the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA), and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA). The forum is a great opportunity for PhD students who have completed their PhD thesis within the last 12 months or who are close to complete their thesis to present their work to a broad audience in the system design and design automation community from both industry and academia. The forum may also help students to establish contacts for entering the job market. In addition, representatives from industry and academia get a glance of state-of-the-art in system design and design automation.

This is the Call for Demonstrations for the University Booth at DATE 2019 in Florence, Italy! The University Booth fosters the transfer of academic work to industry. Prototypes are valuable demonstrators to express and compare the competitiveness of new EDA methodologies and hardware solutions. DATE 2019 features the University Booth in the exhibition hall of the conference venue. Universities and public research institutes are invited to submit their hardware platforms, prototype tools and pre-commercial results for DATE 2019 in Florence, Italy.

The DATE 2018 conference and exhibition attracted more than 1,200 registrations from over 40 countries and concluded with excellent feedback from both participants and exhibitors.

This year, the conference took place for the fifth time in the International Congress Center Dresden, Germany, on March 19 – 23, 2018.

Out of a total of 766 paper submissions received, 39% came from authors in Europe, 26% of submissions were from America, 34% from Asia, and 1% from the rest of the world. This distribution clearly demonstrates DATE’s international character, global reach, and impact.

For the 21^st successive year, DATE presented an exciting technical programme, comprising 79 technical sessions including 8 Exhibition Theatre sessions.

The DATE week started on Monday with four in-depth technical tutorials on the four main tracks of DATE as well as three industry hands-on tutorials given by leading experts in their respective fields. Technical topics covered were emerging technologies for computing, industrial internet-of-things (IoT), reliability from physics to CAD, virtual prototyping and low-power design, as well as industrial topics on building ARM powered IoT, computer vision for automated driving in MATLAB, and how to implement domain-specific modeling languages.

Also on Monday, DATE hosted the first and very successful edition of a new forum, “Advancing Diversity in Electronic Design Automation (DivEDA)”, which aims to increase the number and visibility of women and underrepresented minorities in the research community.

The plenary keynote speakers on Tuesday were Prof. Amnon Shashua, CEO & CTO of Mobileye, an Intel company, and Senior Vice President of Intel Corporation, whose talk was about “The Responsibility Sensitive Safety (RSS) Formal Model toward Safety Guarantees for Autonomous Vehicles” and Dr. Christopher Voigt, Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, who talked about “Programming Living Cells: Design Automation to Map Circuits to DNA”. On the same day, the Executive Track offered a series of business panels with executive speakers from companies leading the design and automation industry, discussing hot topics.