As the days grow longer and the spring garden catalogs arrive in our mailbox, I’m looking forward to seeing the tulip bulbs I planted last fall poking their heads up and to attending this year’s crop of technical conferences. Between keeping up with the latest developments in the industry and catching up with far-flung friends, the annual trade show season that runs from January through early April is a busy but happy time for me. I only wish that the folks who organize these events would get together and try to coordinate their efforts so that they were not so crunched together, often with two or more really important conferences being held on the same week.
One of the best examples of sadistic scheduling is IEC’s
DesignCon and the IEEE’s
International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), held the in the San Francisco Bay Area same week (February 4th this year) abut 45 miles apart. It’s enough to drive you mad.
Both events are top-notch affairs with much excellent technical programming and almost none of the marketing drivel you have to wade through at most conferences. Since they cover somewhat different disciplines, (ISSCC focuses on designing ICs and DesignCon sessions are mostly about using them) you really have to attend both of them to get a good picture of the technologies and issues that our industry is facing today. Consequently, I often find myself poring through both event schedules, trying to figure out which must-see event I can afford to skip and spending entirely too much of the week stuck on Highway 101 frantically shuttling between San Francisco and Santa Clara.
One might think that only a journalist would be this torn between a chip-level conference and an event that was more system-oriented, but I think that many working engineers share the feelings my friend Andy Turudic, who works at Altera on some of their hottest FPGAs, expressed about having the two shows running concurrently:
I'll never understand why they do DesignCon and ISSCC the same week… DesignCon has some good stuff this year that I’d love to catch, but I have to attend ISSCC to keep my design and architecture axes sharp. If they had a brain they'd put them back to back and increase attendance by catching the international crowd, who'd love to spend the weekend in SF and get cheaper airfare.
I’ve considered talking to the shows’ organizers to see if they would consider coordinating their efforts but can’t imagine they’d pay attention to me. They might however, pay attention to a bunch of potential customers who complained that they could not make one show or the other because of the schedule conflict. If you think this is a good idea, you can contact IEC’s Greg Kinley at (312) 559-3303 (gkinley at iec dot org) or write the ISSCC at ISSCC at courtesyassoc dot com
Comments? Questions? Gripes about conflicts with other must-attend conferences? Write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net or post your thoughts on our blog.
