EDP provides a forum for a cross-section of the design community to discuss state-of-the-art electronic design processes and CAD methodologies. Specific goals of EDP 2000 are to:

• Identify and evaluate key trends and known best practices that are driving changes in the design process, with respect to technology and the business model.
• Identify and evaluate the common barriers to product delivery with respect to design processes.
• Identify and prioritize issues requiring further research in development, deployment, and assessment of design processes and the tools to support them.
• Review and update the "rolling roadmap" developed at earlier workshops and disseminate findings to the design community at-large.

• Improving the design process
• Designer productivity
• Design turn-around time
• Design methodology repeatability and convergence
• Technology trends (deep sub-micron, high frequency)
• System level integration issues - mixed signal designs
• Managing and implementing large, dense designs
• The evolving role of the designer in very large designs
• Tool architecture and design styles
• Incremental design tool integration architectures
• Maintaining modularity of integrated incremental design tools
• Architectures for improving tool interchangeability
• Multi-source tool integration experiences
• Distributed and web-based design methodologies
• Standardization, data interchange, and interfaces for reuse of IP
• Measurement and evolution of design processes
• How to manage design process evolution
• Technology transfer for design process research
• Design process measurement techniques
• Design education, undergraduate and continuing

EDP 2000 was sponsored by the Design Automation Technical Committee (DATC) of the IEEE Computer Society, which represents professionals involved in using, researching and developing computer-aided techniques in all aspects of design processes for computer and electronic systems. The DATC subcommittees emphasize design processes, libraries, design languages, logic synthesis, verification (including all forms of simulation), manufacturing interfaces, graphics, and database management. The DATC sponsors and co-sponsors about 15 conferences and workshops such as the Workshop on High-Level Synthesis, the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference and Exhibition, and the Conference on Computer Hardware Description Languages and Their Applications. The DATC works extensively with the many other organizations contributing to Design Automation such as: VHDL International (VI), the Design Automation Standards Subcommittee (DASC), the European SIGVHDL, and Verilog International. The DATC Web Newsletter offers editorial space for all of these organizations. The DATC publishes the Design Automation TC Newsletter four times a year in Design and Test magazine and the Web-based Newsletter throughout the year.

Become a member of DATC, obtain the benefits of an active professional organization, and contribute to the activities of DATC. You can do so using the DATC Web server which can be accessed through: http://www.computer.org/tab/datc.