DAC Topic Selection

Decide the venue and the track before drafting. DAC — the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, "The Chips to Systems Conference" — is the premier forum for electronic design automation (EDA) and chip/system design. Its distinguishing structural fact, absent from the academic architecture venues, is that DAC hosts two peer-reviewed paper tracks with different review models: the double-blind, archival Research Manuscript track and the industry-facing Engineering Track. Picking the wrong track wastes a full cycle just as surely as picking the wrong conference.

The two questions, in order