[Event Report] 25th International Conference on VLSI Design, Hyderabad, India, Jan 7-11, 2012

[Shakthi Kannan]

Hi,

I attended the 25th International Conference on VLSI Design and 11th
International Conference on Embedded Systems [1] between January 7-11,
2012 at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre [2], Hyderabad,
India. The first two days consisted of tutorial sessions, and the next
three days had the conference presentations [3]. There were also
exhibit stalls from different companies.

On the first day I attended the tutorial session on SystemC AMS
extensions [4] by Markus Damm [5], Sumit Adhikari [6], and François
Pecheux [7]. Chitlesh Goorah [8] had earlier tried to get SystemC into
Fedora and Fedora Electronic Lab [9], but, due to licensing issues
[10] it could not be included. SystemC-AMS is now released under
Apache license. Open SystemC Initiative and Accellera Unite have now
integrated to become Accellera Systems Initiative [11]. We hope to
work with them to get their sources under a single free/open source
software license. François Pecheux is from Laboratoire d'Informatique
de Paris 6 [12], Pierre & Marie Curie University (UPMC) [13], and we
already ship their free/open source EDA tools in Fedora.

On day two, I attended the tutorial session by Sridhar Arvind [14] on
3D-ICE [15], a free/open source interlayer cooling emulator from
Embedded System Laboratory [16], Ecole polytechnique fédérale de
Lausanne [17], Switzerland. I have already been working with Sridhar,
Prof. David Atienza [18] and Alessandro Vincenzi  [19] on testing
3D-ICE on Fedora. I had built and tested the dependency SuperLU [20]
library and the 3D-ICE package before the tutorial session. Their
software has already been downloaded by over 70 research labs around
the world. I will push our tested changes to them. On the later half
of the day, I attended a session on verification constraint
complexity. Teal [21] is a useful verification utility and connection
library that has support for constraints and parameter control. The
authors of the tool had agreed to release it as free/open source
software, and we also ship it in Fedora.

On the following three days of the conference, I attended various
paper presentations from different tracks from reconfigurable
architectures to methods in AMS optimization. I met Prof. Susmita
Sur-Kolay [22] from the Indian Statistical Institute [23], Kolkata,
India where they run Fedora in their labs. They also wished to use the
3D-ICE tool and GPU tools in their labs. I also visited the exhibit
stalls meeting different people from the industry and academia. There
are quite a few interesting free/open source tools that users can
benefit from, and we will work in making them available in Fedora. In
2013, the conference will be held in Pune. Thanks to Red Hat for
sponsoring my travel and participation at the conference.

SK

[1] 25th International Conference on VLSI Design.
http://vlsiconference.com/vlsi2012/

[2] Hyderabad International Convention Centre. http://www.hicc.com/

[3] Conference schedule. http://vlsiconference.com/vlsi2012/conf_schedule.htm

[4] SystemC-AMS extensions. http://www.systemc-ams.org/

[5] Markus Damm. https://www.fp7-smartcode.eu/ecws2/biosketch/damm

[6] Sumit Adhikari. http://rfamsarchitects.weebly.com/

[7] François Pecheux.
http://www.lip6.fr/actualite/personnes-fiche.php?ident=P102

[8] Chitlesh Goorah. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Chitlesh

[9] Fedora Electronic Lab. http://spins.fedoraproject.org/fel/

[10] Distributing SystemC in Fedora.
http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-electronic-lab/msg00117.html

[11] Accellera Systems Initiative. http://www.accellera.org/home/

[12] Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6. http://www.lip6.fr/index.php?LANG=en

[13] UPMC. http://www.upmc.fr/en/index.html

[14] Sridhar Arvind. http://people.epfl.ch/arvind.sridhar

[15] 3D-ICE. http://esl.epfl.ch/3d-ice.html

[16] Embedded Systems Laboratory, EPFL. http://esl.epfl.ch

[17] Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. http://www.epfl.ch/index.en.html

[18] Prof. David Atienza. http://people.epfl.ch/david.atienza

[19] Alessandro Vincenzi. http://people.epfl.ch/alessandro.vincenzi

[20] SuperLU library. http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~xiaoye/SuperLU/

[21] Teal. http://www.trusster.com/products/teal/

[22] Prof. Susmita Sur-Kolay. http://www.isical.ac.in/~ssk/

[23] Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. http://www.isical.ac.in/