Hear from Seb Masheder, UKESF Talent Award Holder, about his experience attending an international conference in California

“If you see something that interests you, apply for it, because the worst they can say is no. The YF program said it was for Masters and PhD students, and I was accepted as a 1st year undergraduate, and I gained so so so much from it.”

In this blog, Seb Masheder, undergraduate in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, and UKESF Talent Award Holder, shares his experience of attending the Design Automation Conference 2026 and being part of their Young Fellows Programme, and what he has learned from taking part. DAC 2026 (Design Automation Conference) is the premier global conference for the semiconductor and electronic design industry, bringing together researchers, engineers, and technology leaders to discuss the latest advances in chip design, electronic design automation (EDA), AI-driven design, hardware security, and systems engineering. It is widely regarded as the leading “chips-to-systems” event for the electronic design ecosystem.

1. What excites you most about a career in the semiconductor industry?

I think it’s been a lifelong dream to get involved in it. Having played games for years and years (and spending far too long building redstone machines in Minecraft), I always wanted to build computers, and eventually when I was old enough I was curious about chip design, it spiralled, and here we are.

For the excitement, its probably that it’s an opportunity to continue to push one of, if not the, most complex pieces of technology further and further, simply because I find it absolutely fascinating. I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t want to try build the next Nvidia at some point.

 

2. You’re a UKESF Talent Award-Holder! What has been your experience of the programme so far, and how have you benefited from the scheme?

The programme was really interesting, it gave me the funding to explore my research interests and I couldn’t be more thankful. The seminars at the start were good to see how the industry works and it’s trends, and the meetup at the start was good to meet other people on the programme too.

 

3. Congratulations on being accepted to the DAC Young Fellows Programme! What encouraged you to apply?

I applied to DAC Young Fellows after speaking to my tutor about ideas to spend the Career Development portion of my UKESF Semiconductor Talent Award bursary. He suggested attending the conference due to me building my own EDA tools, but I noticed there was a student programme (which was intended for masters and PhD students), but I applied anyway and got in!

 

4. What was your experience of DAC 63 and what was your favourite part of the conference?

DAC63 was incredible, it was so interesting to see all the different paper presentations and novel ideas and concepts that some of which I’ve never even heard of. The exhibition was also great, managed to get a bunch of cool free stuff from a whole host of companies.

My favourite part was probably the industry presentations in the exhibition. My favourite was a presentation about about we aren’t limited by GPU compute anymore, it’s going to be the amount of CPUs you can fit (and cool) in a rack to be used for agentic tooling, and how the industry doesn’t really know how much is enough.

 

5. What did you do as part of the Young Fellows Programme, and what was the most valuable aspect of it?

For the programme, beyond the application (which was fairly standard):

1. Video call with the other people in your Young Fellows group.
2. Produce an academic poster on your own research/work.
3. Young Fellows breakfast and exclusive presentations the day before the main conference.
4. Produced a 2m video on one of the papers that was presented at the conference.
5. Present your poster in the poster hall to passers by.

The most valuable aspect was probably the poster. It helped me learn how to summarise complex topics into a visual format. The presentation also was helpful as it made me need to think on my feet and get key information across to my audience who might not necessarily be experts in my specific domain.

 

6. What did you learn from attending the conference, and how will it help your future career?

I think the main thing I learned was that far more is possible than you think. With many many post-docs and PhD candidates around, naturally I was exposed to so much original and novel research, and I quickly learned that if something doesn’t exist (a tool, piece of hardware etc), it’s not really as much of a limitation as you think, and it’s now your job to go figure out how to make it work and then go make it. (Obviously money and time dependent)

I also think another massive thing I took away from this was the ability to start thinking laterally at research problems. Most, if not all, of the papers had a problem where the solution wasn’t immediately obvious and they had to go through different methodologies and solutions to figure things out.

 

7. What advice would you give to other students thinking about applying for opportunities like this?

If you see something that interests you, apply for it, because the worst they can say is no. The YF program said it was for Masters and PhD students, and I was accepted as a 1st year undergraduate, and I gained so so so much from it.

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