In deciding where to shoot your silver bullet, there are a variety of factors to consider. (Make sure your boss doesn’t read this part.) Is the conference in an exciting location? Does it have good parties? Are there excellent restaurants nearby? Does the subject matter of the conference match convincingly enough with your project that your manager can be persuaded to spring for the budget?

There are also smaller, more esoteric issues. (You can let the boss start reading again.) For example, if you’re working on high-reliability software in embedded systems for military and aerospace applications, do you want a conference on embedded systems design, or one on software development, or perhaps one on high-reliability engineering? If you choose one too close to what you’re working on and too narrowly focused, you’re likely to feel just like you’re back in your office. No horizon-broadening there. If you pick one that’s too small, there aren’t likely to be any good parties. That’s no good. If you pick a giant-sized one, it may be hard to find anything that actually directly pertains to your project – for your trip report, of course.

Next week, the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) rolls through Silicon Valley. Should this one get your silver bullet? If you haven’t already made your arrangements, it’s probably way too late to start now. Don’t worry, though. We’ll go for you. We happen to like this conference (as conferences go), and you can count on us to give you a top-flight trip report that you can present to your boss, even if you told him you were going to ESC but secretly spent the money on a quick weekender to Maui.

If you need to set the stage, priming the target for the ruse, so to speak, here are a few expectations you can set in advance. First, ESC has moved back to San Jose this year. If you’re planning on rewording and resubmitting last year’s trip report, be sure to search and replace “ San Jose” for “ San Francisco.” If you miss that one, it’ll be a dead giveaway.

Also, because it’s back in San Jose, lots of people who work in Silicon Valley can drop by on a regular workday, without even burning a trip token. You’ll be able to recognize these people because they’ll be the ones actually attending the technical sessions instead of doing what you’d do as a traveler – sleeping in, having a leisurely breakfast at your hotel, meandering down to the show floor to collect a few trinkets before heading back out for lunch, making it back to the show by late afternoon – just in time to see if you won the iPod drawing, then heading back to the hotel to clean up for a long, late night on the town. Conference trips can be demanding, and you should conserve your strength.

As you buzz through the show floor at this year’s ESC looking for that iPod winners board, you’ll want to be aware of a couple of trends that will be in evidence. Embedded systems are always moving toward doing more computing faster and more reliably with less power and on shorter development budgets. Vendors who exhibit at the show know this, and this year you’ll see them talking about lots of ways to accomplish those things. Since the monolithic, single-core processor is running out of gas on the processing-capability-per-power front, you’ll be seeing plenty of discussion of multi-core, multi-processor, multi-thread, and hardware acceleration. All these “multis” are the industry’s way of giving you more embedded processing capability than you’ll be able to use unless the compiler and development tool industry can manage to switch gears and keep up with this newer, more demanding model.

You’ll also notice a lot of vendors talking about new compilers and development and debugging tools to help you manage all this multi-mania. Most of their claims are premature, and the products they’re pushing will accomplish about ten percent of what’s actually possible. There’s enough potential here for at least the next ten ESCs. Look interested, but be wary of what’s offered today.

There will also be a good number of people talking about security. If you think that embedded system security is of concern only to people working on military and aerospace applications and top-secret government projects, you may be surprised to learn that just about everybody developing in the mobile embedded space – from phone handsets through video games and automotive telematics – are demanding more security features in their systems to prevent IP theft and unauthorized use and to protect the privacy of their users’ data.

Another buzzword that will be clomping around on the show floor at ESC this year is “ESL”. Don’t pay any attention to this one. It got lost on its way from DATE in Europe to the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco, and it may stop by ESC asking for directions. Try your best to ignore it. It needs therapy. If you must know, ESL, in this context at least, doesn’t stand for “English as a Second Language.” Instead, it is supposed to mean “Electronic System Level.” Perhaps they meant to stick the word “Design” on the end making it “ESLD,” but they forgot, and that’s the least of this buzzword’s problems. We believe that “ESL” was accidentally hatched in the labs at Dataquest when they needed a really ambiguous category to hold all the miscellaneous tools that didn’t fit cleanly in any of their other 500 electronic design automation (EDA) categories.

If you look past the ESL buzzword, however, there are some cool and diverse capabilities being developed and even sold. ESL doesn’t know whether it’s targeting software or hardware engineers, but most of the companies developing ESL tools do. If you’re a software developer, you’ll find some very innovative products that can help you speed up algorithms using hardware accelerators without having to draft a hardware engineer onto your team. If you’re a system-level designer, you’ll find some great new products for doing high-level tradeoffs of hardware-versus-software implementations of key functionality in your system. If you’re a hardware engineer, you’ll appreciate the new tools that smooth out system-level design and verification, even including the almost intangible embedded software components.

Since many of the vendors will make you sit through marketing presentations and demos in order to bag the best goodies, it pays to be on top of these things so you won’t fall asleep during the part where they’re going to get you to market faster and avoid costly design errors and iterations, all the while increasing system performance and reducing BOM costs. Remember, if you really didn’t want to hear marketing pitches, you should’ve been upstairs in the technical sessions.

While we’re on the topic of technical sessions, it is important to understand the role of these in the typical conference/trade show. Your experience in technical sessions will depend on your own individual conference persona – type A or B. Don’t know which kind you are? Worry not. We can determine this with one simple test: When you were in high-school literature class – did you actually read “Jane Eyre” in its entirety, or did you just buy the Cliffs Notes and fake your way through the essay and exam? Right. We believe you. Hopefully you’re better at fooling your boss. You’re type A.

If you were a Cliffs Noter (you know who you really are), you’ll be wanting to take home a copy of the proceedings. You can line the copies up on the bookshelf in your office next to all the other conference proceedings. This is important, because it will show how scholarly you are and how long you’ve been working in the industry. It’s also proof-almost-positive that you are a conference attendee. You’ll need to open them as well – in order to put wrinkle marks on the spine – a vital detail showing that these proceedings have actually been used, and not just stacked as trophies. While they’re open, you should at least read the abstracts of a few of the more interesting looking papers. This is like the Cliff’s Notes of the Cliffs Notes, but it will be enough information to fake your way through a casual conversation about the paper, even if you weren’t actually awake at 8AM when it was presented.

If you really read Jane Eyre (OK, who was the guy…), you may find yourself actually attending technical sessions. If you’re new, try to sit near the back. It’s unspoken protocol to leave the front 50% of the seats vacant unless the session is really well attended. That way, if the speaker falls into an infinite loop of “uh… uhhh… uhh…” or spends the first 15 minutes trying to get the PowerPoint slides to show correctly on the video projector, you can discreetly make an exit for the coffee bar. By the way – coffee is the fuel that powers technical session attendees, so make sure you don’t run out of gas. Snoring through a paper presentation is not subtle. People will notice – the ones that are awake, at least.

There will be a number of interesting announcements at this year’s ESC. We’d tell you about them now, but we’re under embargo, so you’ll have to wait until next week. “Why,” you ask? Good question. There’s a long-standing myth among marketers that, in order to make a really “big splash,” you should announce your new products at an important trade show. This is a terrible idea. Your “big splash” comes in the form of a press release that goes out during the show, almost lost in the noise of literally tens to hundreds of other press releases precision-timed by your competitors, collectively ensuring that nobody gets too much attention. If you’re one of the lucky ones, the trade press will pick yours and run it in an issue that nobody sees because… they’re attending the tradeshow. HINT: If you announce your product a few weeks BEFORE the show – it might be mentioned in a few publications in time to coerce people into scheduling visits to your booth for a demo. Wouldn’t THAT be cool?

If you’re on our vicarious attendance plan, don’t worry. We’ll cherry-pick the really good announcements and make sure you have access to them for the next several weeks online. We’ll do feature articles on the really big stuff. You won’t be left out. Trust us, the marketers will find you.