There’s still room in the program for some good talks, so if you’d like to present an interesting topic, the organizers want to hear from you. They welcome presentations on a wide range of subjects – but no product commercials, please. The submission deadline is February 26.

This year there will be an emphasis on multi-processing (especially for, but not limited to, EDA) and on 3D ICs. There will be a power(ful) panel too, but at this point, EDP organizers see multi-processing as “hotter” than power. Other topics may include cloud computing, DFM, and the analog revolution (is there one?).

A special part of EDP is the beach walks. There’s nothing like a refreshing walk with stimulating conversations among friends. It was during one of these walks that a colleague convinced me that global warming is real.

EDP is sponsored by the IEEE’s Computer Society and Design Automation Technical Committee. Early registration ends March 1, so if you like valuable workshops and like to save money, sign up this month.

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The social media tag for everyone to use is “snugsj10”. Whether you’re posting a blog entry, writing a news article, or sending a tweet, please use the tag to make your content easy to find. Synopsys users who can’t attend SNUG will either appreciate it or be envious – maybe both.

The traditional Tuesday night interoperability event will be unlike any you’ve seen before. I’ll be very interested to hear what you think about it. Along with the always popular prize booth and food (yes, I’m told there *will* be shrimp), you’ll be able to meet Synopsys bloggers in their respective design communities. We’re putting a lot of effort into this occasion, and we think it will be a worthwhile experience.

If you’ll attend SNUG, be sure to say hi to me. I always enjoy meeting my customers.

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What’s new with DVCon this year? To begin with, it’s one day longer. There were enough high-quality tutorials proposed that the steering committee decided to extend the conference to accommodate them.

The panel that was previously known as the “big-wigs” or “troublemaker’s” panel will take a new approach and focus on real world problems being faced today. Called “What Keeps You Up At Night?”, it will give chief technologists the opportunity to talk about their challenges with contemporary chip design. (You’ll notice there are no EDA companies represented in the lineup of panelists.) The moderator will be JL Gray, a fellow blogger and the author of Cool Verification.

For the first time, the DVCon 2010 Steering Committee included a Social Media Chair (yours truly). In addition to writing blog posts about the conference like several of us did at DVCon 2009, you can expect tweets, photos, videos, and articles. You’ll see the “Twitter Tower by Synopsys” at the conference where attendees can watch the live stream of tweets. If you can’t attend DVCon, fire up your TweetDeck for a personal-sized Twitter Tower.

My colleague, Rick Jamison, and I will host a session on Monday evening at 6pm that everyone is welcome to participate in. Our “Social Media 101 for Engineers” will be an informative (I hope) discussion about social media basics and how today’s new media can help you get your work done better and manage the ever-increasing amount of information that’s out there on Web 2.0. We don’t want to just do a presentation, we want to talk with you, so join us if you can.

As a reminder, everyone posting anything about DVCon is encouraged to use the tag, dvcon, for all blogs, pictures, videos, and articles; use the hashtag #dvcon for tweets. Searching for these tags can put interesting facts, news, and stories at anyone’s fingertips.

On Tuesday, Accellera – the sponsor of DVCon – will have a birthday party. At a lunchtime event, Accellera’s 10th year will be celebrated. I mean all their 10 years, not just the 10th.

Finally, NASCUG (the North America SystemC Users’ Group) will be co-located with DVCon. It’s a good opportunity for system-level designers to capitalize on two events in the same week.

See you at DVCon!

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I’ll pass your comments on to Colin. He’ll probably get a kick out of your feedback.

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Chevrolet’s engineers designed an amazing automobile that is in very high demand. People have been waiting 6 months or more for their orders to be delivered from the GM factory in Oshawa, Canada. For a period of time last year, the 2010 Camaros were as difficult to get as the new Priuses. I was lucky enough to wait only 7 weeks.

Two Saturdays ago I picked up my brand new 2010 2SS Camaro. It’s a limited Transformers edition “Bumblebee” – right out of the movie – with special emblems and logos that charm kids and adults who are kids at heart (like me). It has just about every feature you can imagine, and under the hood is a 6.2 liter 400hp V8 engine. (Believe it or not, it’s rated at 25 mpg on the highway.) There must be a quite a large number of ICs performing all sorts of tasks to make my Camaro safe and powerful. And to the delight of my fellow blogger, Eric Huang of “To USB or Not to USB”, there’s a USB port in the console.

This time, however, I didn’t want a standard. I chose the automatic transmission. A few of my friends scoffed. I did give up a little bit of horsepower, but 400 is plenty for me! If I feel like shifting manually, I can do it with the buttons on the steering wheel that remind me of a video game controller. Plus, the automatic transmission came with a remote starter. I can’t wait to surprise parking lot onlookers.

Enough talk – here are a few pictures of my Bumblebee on the showroom floor, right before I drove it home.

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