Let the Fun Begin!
September 10, 2007
I arrived in San Jose earlier this evening after spending the day yesterday in Seattle. The convention center was bustling as Cadence and the conference support staff get ready for CDNLive! to start tomorrow. Strictly speaking, it's already started, as there were "techtorials" all day today. Not having anything better to do, I decided to wander around the convention center to see if I could find someone from Cadence to chat with to see how the conference prep was going. Only problem was, I didn't feel like changing out of my grimy travel clothes (shorts and a T-shirt), or bringing a notebook/camera with me. I mentioned this to my wife over the phone just before I went down to the convention center. We both agreed there was little chance of anyone caring, especially since I wasn't likely to meet anyone new...
...Except, perhaps, Mike Fister, CEO of Cadence Design Systems. More on that in a second. First, according to one of the conference organizers, over 1000 people have registered for CDNLive!. That seems shockingly large to me, as DVCon was considered a great success with 710 attendees. I'm going to try to confirm that number again tomorrow. I'll let everyone know once I have a more exact figure.
I bumped into Fister and several of the conference organizers at what appeared to be a rehearsal for the keynote tomorrow morning. Strangely, two things popped into my head as I was introducing myself to Fister. First, I recalled a moment back in 2000 at the groundbreaking of Intel's never-to-be-finished downtown Austin office when I found myself alone with Craig Barrett, Intel's CEO at the time. I introduced myself to Barrett, told him what I was working on, and fell into an embarrassing silence and quickly proffered an excuse that allowed me to leave the area. As it turns out, my conversational skills have improved since that sad event. Second, I thought of Cooley's continuing comments about Fister's shoes. As we spoke about verification, the OVM, and what it was like working at Cadence vs. Intel I had the irresistible urge to look at the shoes to see if they really were as fancy as Cooley always claims. I'll try to sneak a photo of the shoes tomorrow for the benefit of Cool Verification readers, but Cooley is right, at the very least they certainly look quite fancy!
I specifically asked Fister about the OVM announcement, and whether it had any relationship to the Synopsys/Intel press release. He claimed the two events were unrelated. Speaking of the OVM, I have yet to meet anyone who could provide any in-depth info on what the methodology will look like. I'll do my best to dig up info on the topic this week. Somewhat surprisingly, Fister also expressed confidence that Specman was still the most advanced verification solution available, and that Cadence was the only language-neutral vendor (given their support for SystemVerilog, e, and SystemC).
After I finished speaking with Fister, I bumped into one of the Techtorial presenters. Apparently, though at least one of the Sunday sessions was full based on advanced registration, only about a third to a half of the registered attendees actually showed up. I'm one of those who had registered for a Sunday session but didn't show up. I think the problem had more to do with the registration form for the conference than people's ill intentions (at least, that was true in my case). I selected a Sunday session, and then quickly realized I was not going to be able to attend. However, there was no way to unselect the session.
That's all I've got this evening. Stay tuned for more tomorrow - same bat time, same bat channel!