A Few Words from the New MUG President

MUG2003 celebrated the 20th anniversary of MUG and 19th annual conference. From April 28-30 more than 300 users joined together in San Jose for a three-day conference that covered PCB, IC, ASIC and FPGA design plus Wire Harness and Embedded Systems. Users from around the world and Mentor Graphics delivered more than 80 presentations. A number of PADS users also joined us for the first time this year. There were plenty of opportunities for learning, networking and just plain fun.

All the tracks had sessions with strong technical content. It was often hard to decide which sessions to attend, as there were many good ones to choose from. What I found interesting was the similarity between a number of PCB and IC issues. Areas like re-usability, yield, data integrity, and change management are similar, only the scale of features are different -- for now. Chris Hamlin from LSI Logic delivered an interesting keynote address and the users were always anxious to hear what Wally Rhines, Mentor CEO and Tom Floodeen, VP of Customer Support had to say.

A couple of new features at the 2003 conference included the Who's Got the Biggest Brain Engineer Olympics, a fun and challenging social event that required you to use both your left and right brain (what a concept!). The Tool Test Drive and Demo Area was also introduced this year. Instead of limiting Mentor product demos to one night, machines were set up all three days of the conference for 3 1/2 hours a day to provide flexibility for the attendees schedules and give them ample opportunity to visit with Mentor and in some cases "test drive" the software.

The vendor fair on Tuesday night had more than 28 partners and vendors of tools that complement the use of Mentor software. The users were pleased with the variety and the opportunity to meet and spend time with the vendors.

The conference capped out on Wednesday night with the announcement of the best paper awards. Congratulations to this years' winners. Details and some pictures are in the conference summary area of the web. Also, don't forget that the conference proceedings are online in the members section of the web site.

MUG2003 was a great conference and we have the pictures to prove it. We're currently reviewing dates and locations for the 2004 conference so stay tuned for an announcement soon. I'm looking forward to serving all Mentor users in my position as your new president.

Please feel free to email me (President@MentorUG.Org) at anytime with comments and suggestions on how we can make MUG work more effectively for you.

Thank you,
Jeff Johnson