| Abstract | The human race has invested about a trillion dollars in the development of semiconductor electronics, and our lives have been improved greatly as a result. Smart devices are now taken for granted and permeate every aspect of our daily lives. One of the important products of this huge investment was the development of sophisticated design optimization and simulation tools to allow the largely automated design and verification of integrated circuits. Sometimes we in the EDA community do not realize quite how advanced we are in this field, and just how applicable much of the Silicon R&D work is to other areas... This talk will be about one such area, namely that of Proton Radiation Cancer Therapy, where a team at IBM, working with researchers at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Research center, have been busy applying knowledge from the VLSI area to this important problem. We will show examples of applying large scale analysis and optimization techniques to the treatment planning problem, and hopefully motivate other EDA researchers to seek applications of their deep knowledge in adjacent fields. |