DesignCon 2023 Opens With Strong Attendance
February 2, 2023 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007Estimated reading time: 1 minute

As George Costanza would say, “DesignCon is back, baby!”
The show opened Wednesday morning, and it really felt like old times again. The aisles of the Santa Clara Convention Center were busy, and the classrooms for the technical conference were nearly full. And I spoke—or tried to speak—with quite a few engineers who spoke almost no English. That’s a good sign; in recent years, there were very few attendees from outside the U.S. because of Covid restrictions. The Pacific Rim is well represented this year.
The welcome reception Tuesday night was literally packed inside the Santa Clara Grand Ballroom. There must have been 150 people eating tacos and drinking IPAs and wine. It was so loud that you couldn’t hear the person next to you. Good problem to have, though!
AI is in the spotlight at DesignCon 2023. The Chiphead Theater hosted a panel on AI in EDA tools. One of the main challenges seems to be getting AI from proof of concept into production. Everyone agrees that AI has a role in EDA, but how to get there is up for discussion. But EDA companies are demonstrating their tools’ AI functionality this week, particularly in simulation and analysis software. AI is here to stay.
This is a good omen for the rest of 2023. People are ready to get back to in-person trade shows and conferences. To use an overused turn of phrase, it seems like old times, but with the latest technology.
Suggested Items
Siemens Leverages AI to Close Industry’s IC Verification Productivity Gap in New Questa One Smart Verification Solution
05/13/2025 | SiemensSiemens Digital Industries Software announced the Questa™ One smart verification software portfolio, combining connectivity, a data driven approach and scalability with AI to push the boundaries of the Integrated Circuit (IC) verification process and make engineering teams more productive.
Cadence Unveils Millennium M2000 Supercomputer with NVIDIA Blackwell Systems
05/08/2025 | Cadence Design SystemsAt its annual flagship user event, CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley 2025, Cadence announced a major expansion of its Cadence® Millennium™ Enterprise Platform with the introduction of the new Millennium M2000 Supercomputer featuring NVIDIA Blackwell systems, which delivers AI-accelerated simulation at unprecedented speed and scale across engineering and drug design workloads.
DARPA Selects Cerebras to Deliver Next Generation, Real-Time Compute Platform for Advanced Military and Commercial Applications
04/08/2025 | RanovusCerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating generative AI, has been awarded a new contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for the development of a state-of-the-art high-performance computing system. The Cerebras system will combine the power of Cerebras’ wafer scale technology and Ranovus’ wafer scale co-packaged optics to deliver several orders of magnitude better compute performance at a fraction of the power draw.
Altair, JetZero Join Forces to Propel Aerospace Innovation
03/26/2025 | AltairAltair, a global leader in computational intelligence, and JetZero, a company dedicated to developing the world’s first commercial blended wing airplane, have joined forces to drive next-generation aerospace innovation.
RTX's Raytheon Receives Follow-on Contract from U.S. Army for Advanced Defense Analysis Solution
03/25/2025 | RTXRaytheon, an RTX business, has been awarded a follow-on contract from the U.S. Army Futures Command, Futures and Concepts Center to continue to utilize its Rapid Campaign Analysis and Demonstration Environment, or RCADE, modeling and simulation capability.