Future of DAC

How do you see DAC evolve in future years?

DAC started out as a community of practice

I think more options need to be developed for actual tool users and tool integrators inside of customer firms to present and interact. DAC has a position relative to
  • vendor user groups, (e.g. SNUG, MUSIC, CDN Live)
  • purely technical conferences,
  • other trade shows, (e.g. DATE)
  • other workshops (like the Electronic Design Process Workshop in Monterey),
  • trade shows for adjacent areas (Embedded Systems Conference, FPGA Summit)
It has historically been focused on multi-vendor (including in-house tools) design flows, in the last decade or so it's narrowed more to ASIC/SOC and had less to do with FPGA and PCB for example. O''Reilly with the Maker Faires is doing a fair amount with FPGA based design that seems to attract a much younger demographic that DAC, which gets a little greyer every year. I guess one possible "death spiral" is academics and vendors talking to themselves while users take a week off.