The Road Less Traveled

DAC begins its second full day in San Francisco, and I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity. I was up there yesterday and found a great variety of vendors, panels, and other events to check out. In the morning, crowds were pretty sparse, but there was a definite pick-up in the afternoon. In particular, there was a lot of congestion around the prominent Synopsys booth, next to a well-visited Standards area.

Fellow blogger JL Gray in front of Twitter Tower (image courtesy jlgray)

Synopsys is diving into "Social Media" in a big way at DAC, so it's worth checking out Conversation Central with its variety of sessions on how to understand and make the best use of these new communications media. The Twitter Tower is a novel way to take in DAC's zeitgeist.

That said, I'd encourage everyone to venture out beyond the comfort and safety of the big EDA vendors! If anything, I de-emphasize visits to the top vendors, because one can follow their announcements and arrange meetings any time of the year. But DAC is a unique opportunity to see a great variety of vendors, from the "second tier" specialist that you're not quite familiar with to the Mom & Pop startup that just rolled out their shingle for their first DAC. To make this discovery more purposeful, I flip through the Exhibitor descriptions in the DAC program and highlight the booths of companies that sound remotely interesting. That way, you can avoid wasting time by ping-ponging between North and South halls. Go for it!

On a lighter note, on Sunday I made my way to San Francisco for an EDAC reception. Before that, I explored Golden Gate Park (stunning!) and snapped a few pictures.

The first perplexed tool user.