Cool Verification

DVCon - February 21-23, 2007

As many of you know, DVCon is being held February 21-23 in San Jose.  Looks like there will be an interesting technical program.  The  Wednesday tutorials will cover assertion-based verification, practical usage of the AVM and VMM SystemVerilog methodologies, formal verification, and SystemC.  Thursday will be focused on  SystemVerilog, SystemC, and physical layer verification, with the afternoon "bigwigs" panel, now renamed the "Troublemakers Panel" moderated by John Cooley. 

I was excited to see that Jerry Vauk from AMD will be participating in the "Blended Coverage: A Recipe for Success" panel discussion moderated by Harry Foster from Mentor on Friday.  I've worked with Jerry in the past, so it will be interested to hear his views on the topic.  The rest of the day will include presentations on the SystemVerilog DPI, formal verification, advanced stimulus generation, low power design, and building reusable IP (among other things).

I am planning to attend DVCon and hope many of you will be there as well.  In fact, I'd love to meet up with any of you who are readers of Cool Verification. If you're going to be in San Jose during the conference please send me an email (jl at coolverification dot com) and let me know!

Also, if my poor, depleted laptop battery can handle it, I'm going to try to post my thoughts on the conference live throughout each day on Cool Verification.  If somehow that gets to be technically difficult I'll upload a report each evening.  If there is any specific information that you'd like to hear about, drop me a line and I'll try my best to find out for you!

On My Way

  Munich Frauenkirche² 
  Originally uploaded by Digitaler Lumpensammler.

Updated August 16, 2006: Fixed a typo.

As I write this I'm sitting at the airport in Austin getting ready to start a three week trip to Munich.  Given all the problems over the last several days with terrorist threats to air travel coming out of the UK, I decided I ought to try to get to the airport a bit earlier than usual.  I was expecting heavy traffic (today is the first day back to school for some districts here in Austin), long lines at the check-in counter, and long lines going through security.  As it turns out, there was very little traffic (though I wasn't actually driving), no lines at the check-in counter (in fact, there wasn't anyone else there checking in!), and no lines at the security checkpoint.  All in all, it took me about 10 minutes from the time I entered the airport to the time I got to my gate... 3.5 hours early!

It's been a couple of years since I last visited Munich.  Last time I arrived about a month after Octoberfest.  This time, I'll be there about a month before Octoberfest.  Bummer! 

I'll be traveling for the next few weeks ramping up on a new project.  I know there are at least a few of you reading this from Munich, and I'd be interested to meet you (or catch up for those of you I've already met).  Drop me an email and let me know if you'd like to get together.

$10 For a Chance to Blow Up Busch Stadium?!?!?!?

A friend of mine just sent me a link to an article from the St. Louis Post Dispatch entitled Cardinals will raffle chances to blow up Busch.  I grew up (for the most part) in St. Louis and enjoyed watching the Cardinals play in Busch Stadium.  I went back this year for the first time in a year and a half and got to go to a Cardinals game at Busch Stadium for the last time as it will be demolished at the end of the regular season.  Amazingly, they've already got half of the new stadium built.  All that 's left to do is demolish the old one and finish the other half of the construction.  I'd definitely take a trip back to STL to get a chance to push the button.  Looks like all I need to do is shell out $10 and the task is mine, all mine... muhahahahah!

;-).