Cool Verification

Last month John Cooley released the results of his 2007 Verification Census.  He concluded, among other things, that SystemVerilog use is up, 'e' use is down, and that most engineers think specialty languages such as 'e' and Vera will be dead in 5 years.  Mike Fister, head honcho at Cadence shot back at Cooley saying that he felt the survey wasn't "statistically relevant".  Cooley claims his 818 responses must be significant, and that Fister is simply "protecting his $4 M paycheck":

My second question was "what is this 3% that Fister is talking about?"  Then
I figured 818 responses / 25,000 ESNUG subscribers = 3.2%.  That must be it.

Hmmm...  I'm not a statistician.  So I phoned Gary Smith about this 3%.

   "Heck, 818 responses is plenty.  We do directed surveys all the
    time and easily as few as 35 responses in a selected category can
    be statistically significant.  Fister needs to track these
    subcategories very closely to know.  So far, Cadence has not been
    open at all about outside information coming into the company."

        - Gary Smith of Gary Smith EDA

OK, so I'm not drinking my own Kool-Aid in this survey.  Crap!  And I'm just
now remembering all those CNN polls where they only asked *500* people about
some Big Issue -- and *that* poll data is considered statistically kosher
to represent the attitudes of 300 million Americans!  Crap.

All this barking was just Mike Fister protecting his $4 M paycheck.  Funny.

After reading this exchange, I felt as though both Cooley and Fister had made mistakes regarding the validity of survey data. I am definitely not a survey expert, so I decided to do some checking on the web to find out whether any of the claims regarding the veracity of Cooley's data could be true.

FYI... I've just finished posting more photos from this year's DATE Conference.  Take a look and let me know what you think!

Earlier this week I posted a note from Stephen Levitan about the verification track at this year's DAC.  Towards the end of the post I wondered aloud whether there would be any interests in setting up a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session at next year's DAC.  Today, Grant Martin commented on that remark to let me know that it isn't too late to set up a BOF session, it just requires 10 people to be interested in attending.  Given that, are there any other bloggers planning on attending DAC that would be interested in getting together Wednesday evening between 6:30-8:00pm?  If so, let me know. 

Earlier this week I received an email from Nanette Collins, the Publicity Chair for DAC this year.  She asked if I would mind sharing a note from Steven Levitan, General Chair of this year's DAC about the verification-focused content of the conference.   Steven is from ECE department at the University of Pittsburgh where, interestingly enough, my dad got his undergraduate degree.  Also interesting is the fact that Kaushik Roy from Purdue University, my alma mater, is the Design Community chair, but I digress… Here's what Steven had to say:

DAC is fast approaching, June 4-8 in San Diego.  I'll be there for the first time along with a few other folks from Verilab.  I need to sit down and go through the schedule to figure out what I'd like to get out of the conference.  The only thing I've got planned for certain is to hit the Denali party on Tuesday evening.  There's also a chance I may attend the Magma press event (seems to have been scheduled around the Denali party, so the Denali party must be pretty good!).  Anyone else out there planning on attending the conference?  If so, I'd love to meet up, especially with those of you with EDA-related blogs.  Please drop me a line at jl at coolverification dot com and we can arrange a time to get together.  Also let me know if you have the inside scoop on any cool events going on during the week.