Saturday, November 26, 2011

Asian Test Symposium 2011: Part I

It all started with an email that Prof Abhijit Chatterjee from Georgia Tech sent to my manager Rohit Kapur in the first week of February stating that he wanted to meet with the Test people in Synopsys Bangalore. Prof Chatterjee was going to be the General Chair of ATS 2011 to be held in Delhi in November. He was trying to meet the people from academic and industry in India in order to drum up support for the conference.

There are four  Test conferences that happen annually - ITC, VTS, ETS and ATS. International Test Conference (ITC) is the most premier conference of all these. I think next comes VLSI Test Symposium (VTS). Both ITC and VTS happen in US. European Test Symposium (ETS) and Asian Test Symposium (ATS) rotate amongst countries in Europe and Asia respectively. ATS usually comes to India once in every decade. ATS 2011 would be 20th ATS.

Prof Chatterjee came to meet us on February 10th in our Synopsys Bangalore office. He was accompanied by Prof Viren Singh of IISc. My friend and colleague Parthajit and I met them for some time where they explained us about the Test Oddysey theme for this ATS. We then took them to lunch at Indijoes at RMZ Infinity.

We submitted two papers to the conference. Both of these were already filed as US patents in USPTO. One was on the concept of Predicting Test Compression QoR and the other one was on something called Cyclical Adaptive Scan (CAS). Both the papers were accepted. So I got the opportunity to travel.I'd be presenting the Compression Maximizer paper. My colleague Pramod was invited to be a moderator for one of the sessions. So both of us would travel from Synopsys Bangalore to attend ATS in Delhi.

But there was a bit of a problem. We were expecting our second baby and Gitika's expected date of delivery (EDD) was Dec 14th. We had some buffers so that I could go and present the paper in ATS. I was still a bit hesitant. As usual, Gitika is one of the brave ladies I've ever met. If I would have been in her place, I would have never let my spouse to travel in such a crucial time.But Gitika was exactly opposite. She was encouraging me to attend ATS and present the paper. One day Rohit called me and spoke to Gitika about my travel. She told Rohit also that I should travel.

Gitika's sugar level was high. So her gynecologist told us that we won't wait till EDD. Finally we planned Novemver 25th as her day for c-sec. I'd come back to Bangalore after the end of the last day of ATS on Nov 23rd and get her admitted on Nov 24th night.

But something different was waiting for me..

I landed in Delhi on Nov 20th, Sunday, one day ahead of ATS in order to meet my old friends in Noida. I visited Utpal da's family and had lunch there. After that, I went to meet my ex-colleague and friend Subhasish. He has newly constructed a beautiful house in Noida. Utpal da dropped us at our C.R. Park hotel later in the evening.

No comments: