DesignCon 2012: New Sessions & Product Teardowns Announced for Premier Systems Design Conference

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- UBM Electronics, a UBM company and the daily source of essential business and technical information for the electronics industry's decision makers, has announced new programs added to the 100+ sessions for DesignCon 2012, to be held in Santa Clara, Calif., January 30 through February 2, 2012. As part of the 14 tracks that include technical paper presentations, tutorials, sponsored training sessions, and keynote addresses, show organizers will present a panel entitled "Delivering on Time-to-Answer: Meeting Designers Needs in Test and Measurement," as well as newly announced product teardowns.

Taking place on Wednesday, February 1 from 3:45pm to 5:00 p.m., the test and measurement panel will be moderated by Patrick Mannion, director of content, UBM Electronics, and speakers who will discuss the nature of test, the interactions and issues designers face, how test technology is evolving to meet designers' needs and what to anticipate next.

"Designers face ever-shorter time-to-market windows and consistently look to their test equipment for faster 'time to answer'," said Mannion. "Yet this requirement clearly flies in the face of the increasing complexity required in these systems.  This panel pulls together the best minds in the industry to explore how these conflicting trends can be resolved..."

Panel speakers include Greg Peters, VP and general manager of Agilent's Component Test Division (CTD), which products include vector network analyzers, device test instruments and test accessories; David Graef, VP and chief technology officer of LeCroy Corporation; and Kevin Ilcisin, chief technology officer of Tektronix Corporation.

The panel rounds out the busy schedule of the only Silicon Valley eventthat addresses the chip, system and package challenges of high-speed design faced by both board designers and chip design engineers.

"Silicon Valley is the center of the social media world and it's important for the leaders in that and all related industries to realize that hardware is the first step in making those connections possible," said David Blaza, vice president, UBM Electronics. "DesignCon is the premier event that addresses the infrastructure that makes the hottest social technologies possible."

To demonstrate this point, sessions have also been added that will feature teardowns of tablet computers and a Cisco Wi-Fi router. The "Tablet Smackdown" on Tuesday, January 31 at 2 p.m. will feature teardown specialists from iFixit who will take apart the Amazon Fire and Nook Color tablets in front of participants to analyze their insides. The session will also focus on the usability issues that have plagued both Android tablets.

The second teardown session is the "Android Tablet and Connectivity Showdown" on Wednesday, February 1 at 4 p.m. This session will comprise a comparative analysis of two modestly priced tablet devices, as well as a high-end Wi-Fi router to which they have been connected, to allow an exploration of the product and design choices that make them possible. The teardowns of the Vizio VTAB1008 and the Viewsonic gTablet, as well as the Cisco Linksys E3200 dual-band N router, will facilitate an interactive panel discussion on general tablet design and wireless connectivity in particular.

Additionally, the conference schedule is headlined by this year's keynote speakers, all representing Silicon Valley-based companies that depend on hardware infrastructure to develop and deliver technology advancements to their end consumers:

• Monday, January 30th:  Joe Macri, corporate vice president and chief technology officer of AMD's client division, is also chairman of the Jedec JC42.3 Dram Committee and vice chair at large of the Jedec board of directors. His areas of expertise are in CPU, memory and graphics design, with more than 20 patents pending or granted.
• Tuesday, January 31st:  Ilan Spillinger, corporate vice president for hardware architecture for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business Hardware division, leads the Xbox 360 and Kinect architecture development and verification, silicon design, hardware incubation, and business development efforts. He is an expert on gaming, its underlying architectures and the future of sensor-based user interfaces.
• Wednesday, February 1st:  Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, the center of the company's R&D, will discuss where new opportunities lie and what HP may be doing about them. Banerjee's own research interests include very-large-scale integration (VLSI) computer-aided design, parallel computing and compilers, and he is the author of about 300 research papers in these areas.

DesignCon's four days of educational sessions will focus on topics driving current and future technology developments, including analog and mixed-signal design, chip-level design for signal and power integrity, FGPA, high-speed signal processing, RF/Microwave design, system co-design, test and measurement methodology and much more. DesignCon's official host sponsor Agilent is presenting an educational forum on design and test challenges in next generation high-speed serial standards on Monday, January 30th and Tuesday, January 31st.

For more information on the conference agenda and summits, as well as to register, please visit http://www.designcon.com/?cid=pr.

About UBM Electronics  

UBM Electronics is the global leader in media and marketing solutions for the electronics industry.   UBM Electronics delivers results for the key influencers and decision makers involved in the design, development and commercialization of technology through its market leading brands, peer communities and professional education services.   More than 2.2 million engineering professionals engage with UBM Electronics brands which include EE Times, EDN, EDN China, EDN Asia, EDN Japan, Design News and Test & Measurement World, TechOnline, Designlines and Embedded.com across the globe to accelerate technology sales. The international electronics community gathers at UBM Electronics market leading events such as the Embedded Systems Conferences, DesignCon and ARM Technology Conference to share, learn, discuss, and advance the critical issues and challenges facing the electronics industry. Additionally, UBM Electronics provides end-to-end services ranging from next-generation marketing, integrated media, custom solutions and research.  UBM Electronics is part of UBM (UBM.L) a global provider of media and information services for professional B2B communities and markets.

About UBM LLC

UBM LLC is a leading global business media company. We inform markets and bring the world's buyers and sellers together at events, online, in print and provide them with the information they need to do business successfully. We focus on serving professional commercial communities, from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewellery traders, from farmers to pharmacists around the world. Our 6,000 staff in more than 30 countries are organised into specialist teams that serve these communities, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently.

For more information on DesignCon 2012 or UBM Electronics please contact:

Patricia Staino, BtB Marketing Communications
T: 919-872-8172, E: patricia.staino@btbmarketing.com

Felicia Hamerman, Vice President, Marketing
T: 516.562.5652, E: felicia.hamerman@ubm.com

SOURCE UBM Electronics