edaForum08 - Preface

For more than forty years microelectronics has always been marked by fast innovations happening in short time. The most important progress is based on the success of the microelectronics industry by exponentially reducing the feature sizes and thereby doubling the amount of components per chip every two to three years. The most important trend resulting from this are the exponentially falling prices for the particular functions, which in turn has led to enormous improvements of the economical productivity of the entire industry influencing almost every area of our daily lives. In order to optimize the microelectronic products for their corresponding applications, application-oriented electronic design automation is decisive.

edaForum 2008 is well aware of these challenges and is ready to tackle them. Therefore we have invited experts from the USA, Asia, and Europe to share with you newest design methods allowing to design more and more complex products in short time, but with high efficiency and highest quality. However, edaForum 2008 is much more than that. It sticks to its principles and offers besides the technical talks also space and time for today’s burning economical questions of microelectronics starting with the first keynote discussing the role of fabs and current trends of fabless design. Further topics will give you details on economical chances of “More than Moore”, which are of especially high importance for the German automotive electronics.

On a larger scale we also would like to discuss highly important aspects of microelectronics and EDA for the global world economy and vice versa. As we all know the microelectronics industry is much more than any other industry depending on its particular macro-economical environment. Private as well as professionally conditioned demand regarding microelectronic products extremely depends on the overall economical mood which is depending itself on global mega trends, which have an enormous influence on the demand of new microelectronic products.

First and foremost we should talk about global warming on the one hand, and fossil fuels coming to an end on the other hand, but all these problems don’t only bear risks and therefore shouldn’t only be seen as bleak. Indeed, there are also many new opportunities for microelectronics. Due to its importance we have dedicated an entire session of the edaForum 2008 to this question. In this context we also seize the opportunity to discuss further topics, such as aging societies and the shortage of young engineers and computer scientists. A second keynote and a thrilling panel will conclude our Forum this year.

During and in-between the sessions we appreciate lively discussions and welcome your ideas and questions.

So I’m looking forward to welcome you to this year’s edaForum in Dresden.