SAN DIEGO – The Design Automation Conference kicked off early this week at the San Diego Convention Center. On June 6, PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & FAB visited exhibitors and spoke with Robert Gardner, the EDA Consortium’s executive director. (EDAC is one of three owners of the show.)

Gardner noted that the 2011 show, in its 48th year, included 205 exhibitors, compared to between 180 and 190 last year. He said the 2012 conference will return to San Francisco, where it attracted 8,000 attendees in 2009; in 2013, it will head to Austin, and in 2014, the show will reconvene in San Francisco.

Before the final post-show numbers were out, Gardner believed this conference brought in about 7,000 attendees, whereas the Anaheim conference last year had 6,000. The show is “more vibrant every year,” he said.

The show organizers are interested in moving into stacked vias, 3D ICs and the assembly space in the future, Gardner mentioned.

On the floor, a DAC Pavilion was the site for three full days of general interest panel and small group discussions. The opening session, EDA: Trends and What’s Hot at DAC?, was “standing room only.”

A classroom-like space on the opposite side of the room, the Exhibitor Forum, was allocated for commercial presentations by exhibitors.

Exhibit hall standouts included Mentor Graphics, a large outfit with a bustling crowd, and Cadence, with its Cadence EDA360 Theater, where the firm gave consecutive presentations. The company also held a lunch panel discussion: Getting a jumpstart on 20NM.

Fab company TSMC’s booth was a show within a show, with multiple meeting rooms, while rival Global Foundries rounded out the largest booths on the floor.

Other exhibitors included Sigrity, Polar Instruments, CST, Sonnet, Agilent, Artwork Conversion Software, and market research firm IHS iSuppli.

In a packed Q & A keynote with Mike Cassidy, San Jose Mercury News columnist, Steve Wozniak, Apple cofounder, spoke fondly of the early days of computer technology, including four uninterrupted sleepless nights working on an Atari project with colleague Steve Jobs. Wozniak noted that when he was a teenager, and he told his father, “Someday I’m going to have a computer,” and his father responded, “You know they cost as much as a down payment on a house, right?” he responded, “I’ll have a computer and live in an apartment.”

When asked about his favorite current gadgets, Wozniak said, “All of them.” He said he at one time had seven GPS systems on his dashboard and purposefully made wrong turns to see what they would do differently. He videoed their disparate responses. “I put it on YouTube,” he laughed.