The Young Fellows Program at the 58th Design Automation Conference  (www.dac.com) is a special DAC program to kickstart young students in the field of EDA. As a DAC Fellow you will enjoy not only free access to the DAC conference, but also participate in a unique hands-on HLS lab, live interaction with experts from large EDA companies, career coaching and much more. This elaborate program is free of charge for students. It is funded by the Design Automation Conference with generous support from Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys Inc. Here is a summary of what to expect as a DAC fellow:

- The 2021 Fellow program will be virtual to enable students from all over the world to participate.  This avoids COVID-related travel limitations and makes it convenient to combine the program with school or other day job activities.
- The program will kick off on November 4th, 2021 (4 weeks before DAC) and run until December 15th (the week after DAC). During that time there will be several events. Plan to spend approximately 3 hours per week working towards different modules of the program. Some activities will be during Pacific Standard Time, yet we will accommodate other time zones across the world.
- The program is FREE. Even better: participants will receive a complimentary registration for the 2021 Design Automation Conference. In case of attendance in San Francisco in person you will receive a full conference badge ($725 value)*. In case of virtual attendance this is a pass to the Virtual DAC conference. Participants that stand out may win significant cash prizes thanks to generous support from our sponsors.
- Make friends during social activities: There will be an opening session and a ‘get to know each other’ networking session. In order to foster collaborations and make lasting bonds as part of your experience, you will be working in a team with other young fellows. The teams will be formed based on interest and time-zone compatibility while also trying to get you to know people whom you might not have met before.
- At the same time the program will include a professional development component where you will learn how to write and present your research.
- There will be a hands-on lab where you use a processional EDA tool to generate machine learning hardware. You meet with your team via zoom to participate in these Labs.
- Prepare a digital poster of the work you are doing and present this to us during a special DAC Poster session. There will be a few time slots to serve the different time zones. The topic should be the research of your choosing, for instance your latest project, or the paper you prepared for DAC. Your  poster presentation could be attended by well known EDA professors, professionals and perhaps your future employer.
- During the week of the hybrid DAC you attend the sessions, keynotes and more. Students are asked to prepare a short video on a research paper that you liked. This can be any paper presented at DAC, other than your own or the ones of your institution. You can find examples of last year’s videos on the FB timeline at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/651674381547635/ .
- We end with our famous closing session. Upon successful completion you will receive a formal certificate .
- As an extra incentive there will be thousands of dollars in prizes for the teams and individuals that stood out.  

This program is a truly exciting introduction into the world of Design Automation, while at the same time making new friends.

We look forward to your participation in the DAC Young Fellows Program!

Laleh Behjat / University of Calgary
Patrick Groeneveld / Cerebras & Stanford University
Matt Morrison / University of Notre Dame
Jingtong Hu / University of Pittsburgh
(The DAC58 Young Fellows team)

PS: join our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/651674381547635/