You always remember your first DAC

My first DAC was DAC32, San Francisco Moscone Center, 1995. If you can remember this far back, this was when the main DAC conference party was cool, and there was no Denali party...

It was 2 years after I had finished my masters' degree, the first large conference I had been to. I was working for a small (30-person) startup in the UK.

We didn't know *anything* - one of the other guys had been a previous year, but that's all the experience we had. Things were a little more formal then, especially in the UK (everyone wore a shirt & tie to the office every day) so I brought my suit and bought a new pair of shoes for the occasion.

I ended up in some hotel that had no air conditioning and that was not on the DAC shuttle route, and which required walking through the somewhat dangerous "tenderloin" area of San Francisco to get to the Moscone center. I was hot all the time, and boy, did my feet hurt after that week!

But... it was a great show. I spent most of my time in the academic sessions that year and the following year started hawking our FPGA place&route software in the exhibition hall between sessions - despite not having a booth or even a demo suite.

I've been to all the DACs since (might have missed one... New Orleans '99 I think)

Long live DAC!

Next Post >

Comment

You need to be a member of The DAC Fan Club to add comments!

Join The DAC Fan Club

Comment by David Stratman on July 17, 2009 at 2:31pm: Marc I completely agree...while I've been in the chip design world for a while, as a relative newbie to EDA, the first DAC that I "worked" was the 44th in San Diego. The main takeaway was to make sure to bring the right shoes and splurge for the deluxe carpet padding in your booth. Thank goodness for gel inserts.

But in all seriousness, it was an eye opening sight to experience what all goes into a successful company booth and an overall successful DAC; lots of very smart folks putting in extraordinary efforts and coming together to further the industry.

Enjoyed your talks at MemCon this year...and thanks to Denali for keeping the party rolling!

Comment by Mark Gogolewski on July 17, 2009 at 10:19am: Funny enough, that was one of the few I missed. We were just starting to write the code that was the early genesis of Denali's MMAV memory modeler product. My task was mostly focused on writing the memory debugger GUI. I look back and shudder at the code I wrote in those early days. Thankfully, my early code is long gone. :)