The 23rd DATE conference and exhibition is the main European event bringing together designers and design automation users, researchers and vendors, as well as specialists in the hardware and software design, test and manufacturing of electronic circuits and systems. DATE puts a strong emphasis on both technology and systems, covering ICs/ SoCs, reconfigurable hardware and embedded systems, and embedded software.

The five-day event consists of a conference with plenary invited papers, regular papers, panels, hot-topic sessions, tutorials and workshops, two special focus days and a track for executives. The scientific conference is complemented by a commercial exhibition showing the state-of-the-art in design and test tools, methodologies, IP and design services, reconfigurable and other hardware platforms, embedded software, and (industrial) design experiences from different application domains, e.g. automotive, IoT, wireless, telecom and multimedia applications. The organisation of user group meetings, fringe meetings, a university booth, a PhD forum, vendor presentations and social events offers a wide variety of extra opportunities to meet and exchange information on relevant issues for the design and test community. Special space will also be allocated for EU-funded projects to show their results.

The Conference

The conference addresses all aspects of research into technologies for electronic and

(embedded) systems engineering. It covers the design process, test, and tools for design automation of electronic products ranging from integrated circuits to distributed large-scale systems. This includes both hardware and embedded software design issues. The conference scope also includes the elaboration of design requirements and new architectures for challenging application fields such as telecom, wireless communications, multimedia, healthcare and automotive systems. Persons involved in innovative industrial designs are particularly encouraged to submit papers to foster the feedback from design to research. Panels, hot-topic sessions and embedded tutorials highlight and inform about emerging topics.

Special Days in the programme will focus on two areas bringing new challenges to the system design community:

Embedded Artificial Intelligence: Nowadays there are many cognitive applications (e.g. speech recognition) working on portable mobile devices, which however perform most of their intensive computations on the cloud. This implies power hungry servers spread all over the world, plus an important continuous communication overhead between the edge devices, the internet and the servers, drastically increasing the power consumption of world-wide internet. If internet power consumption keeps increasing with the present trend, it is estimated that by 2030 one fifth of the worldwide electricity consumption would be just to keep internet and their servers running. By moving cognitive computation intense tasks locally on embedded edge devices, not only world-wide internet power consumption growth trend will be reduced, but also users will recover their right to keep their personal data privacy. In this Special Day on Embedded AI, sessions will be organized to discuss new trends in cognitive algorithms, hardware architectures, software designs, emerging device technologies as well as the application space for deploying AI into edge devices. The topics will include technical areas to enable the realization of embedded artificial intelligence on specialized chips, such as bio-inspired chips, with and without self-learning capabilities, special low power accelerator chips for aiding in vector/matrix-based computations, convolution and deep-net chips, etc for possible machine learning, cognitive, and perception applications in health, automotive, robotics, or smart cities applications.

Silicon Photonics has emerged as a promising solution in the area of high performance computing. This emerging technology opens new multi-disciplinary research questions including low-loss CMOS compatible components, as well as software CAD and design tools to explore the design space of the resulting complex devices and systems. The DATE special day on silicon photonics will focus on data communication via photonics for both data center/high-performance computing and optical networks on chip applications. Industrial and academic experts will highlight recent advances on devices and integrated circuits. The sessions will also feature talks on design automation and link-level simulations. Other applications of silicon photonics such as sensing and optical compute will also be discussed.

DATE 2020 will have a timely Special Initiative “Autonomous Systems Design - Automated Vehicles and beyond” on Thursday and Friday which will include reviewed and invited papers as well as working sessions. There will be a separate call for papers.

The Exhibition

The vivid accompanying exhibition states a unique networking opportunity for vendors of tools and services for hardware and embedded software for the design, development and test of Systems-on-Chip, IPs, Embedded Systems, ASICs, FPGAs and PCBs. Furthermore, it states the perfect venue for industries to meet university professors to foster their university programme and especially for PhD students to meet their future employers.

A full programme in the Exhibition Theatre will again combine presentations by exhibiting companies, best-practice reports by industry leaders on their latest design projects and selected conference special sessions.

The full list of participating exhibitors and sponsors including their company profiles can always be found online: https://date20.date-conference.com/exhibitors-sponsors

Topic Areas for Submission

Within the scope of the conference, the main areas of interest are organised in the following tracks. Submissions can be made to any of the track topics.

Track D: Design Methods and Tools addresses design automation, design tools and hardware architectures for electronic and embedded systems. The emphasis is on methods, algorithms, and tools related to the use of computers in designing complete systems. The track’s focus includes significant improvements on existing design methods and tools as well as forward-looking approaches to model and design future system architectures, design flows, and environments.

This track is organised in the following topics:

D1 System Specification and Modelling
D2 System-Level Design Methodologies and High-Level-Synthesis
D3 System Simulation and Validation
D4 Formal Methods and Verification
D5 Design and Test for Analogue and Mixed-Signal Circuits and Systems, and MEMS
D6 Design and Test of Secure Systems
D7 Network on Chip and Communication-Centric Design
D8 Architectural and Microarchitectural Design
D9 Low-power, Energy-efficient and Thermal-aware Design
D10 Approximate Computing
D11 Reconfigurable Systems
D12 Logical and Physical Analysis and Design
D13 Emerging Design Technologies for Future Computing
D14 Emerging Design Technologies for Future Memories

Track A: Application Design is devoted to the presentation and discussion of design experiences with a high degree of industrial relevance, real-world implementations, and applications of specific design and test methodologies. Contributions should illustrate innovative or record-breaking designs, which will provide viable solutions in tomorrow’s silicon, embedded systems, and large-scale systems. In topic A8, there is the opportunity to submit 2-page papers that expose industrial research and practice.

This track is organised in the following topics:

A1 Power-efficient and Sustainable Computing
A2 Robotics and Industry 4.0
A3 Automotive Systems and Smart Energy Systems
A4 Augmented Living and Personalized Healthcare
A5 Secure Systems, Circuits, and Architectures
A6 Self-adaptive and Learning Systems
A7 Applications of Emerging Technologies
A8 Industrial Experiences Brief Papers

Track T: Test and Dependability covers all test, design-for-test, reliability, and designfor-robustness issues, at system-, chip-, circuit-, and device-level for both analogue and digital electronics. Topics of interest also include diagnosis, failure mode analysis, debug and post-silicon validation challenges, and test or fault injection methods addressing system security.

This track is organised in the following topics:

T1 Modelling and Mitigation of Defects, Faults, Variability, and Reliability
T2 Test Generation, Test Architectures, Design for Test, and Diagnosis
T3 Microarchitecture-Level Test and Dependability
T4 System-Level Test and Dependability
T5 Design and Test for Analogue and Mixed-Signal Circuits and Systems, and MEMS
T6 Design and Test of Secure Systems

Track E: Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems is devoted to the modelling, analysis, design and deployment of embedded software or embedded/cyber-physical systems. Areas of interest include methods, tools, methodologies and development environments. Emphasis will also be on model-based design and verification, embedded software platforms, software compilation and integration, real-time systems, cyber-physical systems, networked systems, and dependable systems.

This track is organised in the following topics:

E1 Real-time and Dependable Systems
E2 Embedded Systems for Machine Learning
E3 Model-Based Design, Verification and Security for Embedded Systems
E4 Embedded Software Architecture, Compilers and Tool Chains
E5 Cyber-Physical Systems Design