From the program co-chairs of Hot Chips XVII (2005)

The Program Committee for Hot Chips XVII is pleased to present the latest and greatest in chips and related products, systems and research. We received more submissions this year than for any previous Hot Chips conference, and we believe that the quality of the program reflects this. Like any conference, Hot Chips tracks the trends in its field, in this case the semiconductor, electronics and computer industries. This year, as usual, we feature some high-end CPUs, including those destined for PCs and for game machines. A prime current concern of the industry is power minimization and management, and several of the presentations will focus on this issue. As always, there are specialized processors for application domains that are believed to be large enough to support specialization and to demand the level of performance that is only available from specialized designs, such as audio, video and communications. We made a special effort this year to attract presentations from the FPGA world, which has been underrepresented at Hot Chips in the past. We've also salted the program with presentations on cutting edge and speculative technologies. Hot Chips is run differently than other conferences: The program is not assembled, as is usual for most technical conferences, by seeing what comes in over the transom (or past our spam filter); in addition to considering unsolicited submissions, we also actively solicit presentations meeting our criteria. Presentations at Hot Chips are accepted on the basis of an abstract, and only copies of the speakers' slides are printed, so presenters can show their latest work with the lowest possible effort and shortest lead time. This bleeding edge focus can also result in papers that must be withdrawn when marketing and product schedule realities interfere. (This year was unusual- no one dropped out of the conference.) Finally, while presentations are provisionally accepted on the basis of an abstract, they aren't fully accepted until the slides are reviewed and approved by a program committee member (usually their session chair) for their technical content. Session chairs at Hot Chips are not merely decorative.