Designing Integrated Circuits That (Usually) Work

The num­bers are in. The San Diego County Fair in Del Mar fin­ished its annual 22 day run last Mon­day with record atten­dance. In the mean­time, atten­dance was down at the Design Automa­tion Con­fer­ence, held dur­ing the fair’s run just 80 miles to the north in Ana­heim. Did some of those headed for DAC slip away to the fair? Of course, the astute note that last year’s DAC was in San Fran­cisco, just a Cal­Train com­mute away from the mass of engi­neers in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Okay, so let’s com­pare to the 2008 DAC, also held in Ana­heim. Up this year! Down 29%, from 4828 to 3444. And how did last year’s SF DAC atten­dance com­pare to the pre­vi­ous DAC in SF? A lit­tle dig­ging finds the atten­dance his­tory for DAC and the Del Mar fair, posted above.

The atten­dance fig­ures for DAC include those reg­is­tered for full con­fer­ence and exhibit only, exclud­ing exhibitors and oth­ers. The fair folks have suc­cess­fully upped their over­all atten­dance by sim­ply increas­ing the num­ber of days run, start­ing with 10 days in 1949, so what’s charted is the more mean­ing­ful aver­age daily atten­dance. Since that’s yet around 10 times higher than the over­all DAC atten­dance, the chart is nor­mal­ized by com­par­ing every­thing to 2004 atten­dance levels.

The DAC atten­dance fig­ures still aren’t what they were a few years ago but it’s recov­er­ing along with the econ­omy. And it’s the econ­omy that’s dri­ving the rise in fair atten­dance, right? Wait a minute. Why was the fair atten­dance down in the “good” years, say 2006? Did all those extra engi­neers at DAC that year keep their kids away from the San Diego Fair? Of course, DAC and the fair do tend to draw from a dif­fer­ent pool of peo­ple but maybe there’s a hid­den mes­sage in the num­bers: When busy at work, there’s no time for the fair.  Or for DAC?

{ 3 comments }