After months of planning and anticipation, the DesignCon Show and Conference will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, from January 31 through February 2.

This year’s show will encompass three days of education, exhibits, and networking, through a myriad of technical paper sessions, tutorials, industry panels, product demos, and expo hall and social functions.

DesignCon’s 14-track conference program, created by engineers for engineers, will provide useful nuts-and-bolts information for design engineers ranging from theory to practical applications. Some areas covered include signal and power integrity, chip I/O and power modeling, photonics and wireless in electrical design, materials and processing, high-speed link and advanced I/O interface design, interconnects modeling and analysis, test and measurement, machine learning and AI, and 5G and communications.

Besides a rich array of technical sessions, DesignCon will also feature panel sessions where industry leaders will present their views on selected topics. While many of these sessions will take place in conference rooms off the show floor, several will also take place in the Chiphead Theater, which is conveniently located in the Exhibit Hall.

The educational aspect of DesignCon will take on even greater focus with boot camps covering core industry concepts, and three-hour tutorial sessions where timely topics are covered in depth. Some of the tutorial ubjects covered include quantum computing hardware design, design and verification for high-speed I/Os, machine learning for embedded developers, and PCB design techniques.

Related:DesignCon Is Coming Soon!

Drive World

This year’s DesignCon will once again include Drive World, which will provide additional conference content in the growing areas of automotive electronics and intelligence. Session topics focus on security and safety, sensing technologies, autonomous and ADAS technologies, and connectivity and infotainment. For more on the sessions, go here.

Keynotes

As with previous DesignCon shows, there will be several interesting keynote sessions dealing with hot topics in electronics. This year’s keynote session lineup is as follows:

─On Tuesday, January 31 from 11:45 am to 12:30 pm Pacific time, Aydin Aysu, Assistant Professor and Head of the Hardware Cybersecurity Research Lab (HECTOR) at Electrical & Computer Engineering Department of North Carolina University, will deliver the first keynote, titled “Post-Quantum Cryptography: The Next Decade of Cryptographic Hardware Design.” More details can be found here.

Related:DesignCon Came Back Big with a Robust Conference and Expo

-On Wednesday, February 1, from 10:00 to 11:00 am Pacific time, Devin Billings, Associate Director of Electrical Research and Development at Boston Dynamics, will deliver the second keynote, titled “Enabling Autonomous Robotics Through Electrical Engineering.” The talk will discuss the electrical engineering advances that are enabling the development of autonomous robots, giving them mobility, dexterity, and agility on a scale not thought possible a few years ago. More on Boston Dynamics here.

-On Thursday, February 2, from 10:00 to 11:00 am Pacific time, Ben Gu, Vice President Research and Development, Multiphysics System Analysis Business Unit at Cadence Design Systems, will deliver the third keynote titled, “The Intelligence to Design Intelligent Machines.” This session will address the role of artificial intelligence in the design of electronics systems requiring advanced semiconductors and process nodes. Details can be found here.

Exhibits

Over 100 exhibitors will occupy the halls of the Santa Clara Convention Center, showing the latest products and technologies in areas such as interconnects, electronic components, materials, test equipment, batteries and power sources, design tools and services, microprocessors and microcontrollers, power electronics, semiconductors, thermal management, and more. A list of exhibitors can be found here.

More information on DesignCon can be found here.

Spencer Chin is a Senior Editor for Design News covering the electronics beat. He has many years of experience covering developments in components, semiconductors, subsystems, power, and other facets of electronics from both a business/supply-chain and technology perspective. He can be reached at [email protected].