Cool Verification

I came upon the news of Moshe's departure from Cadence in a bit of a roundabout fashion.  I've been getting a heavy amount of traffic this week from a Google cached copy of the Conference Coverage section of Cool Verification.  Specifically, people are looking for a photo I took at DVCon last year of Moshe Gavrielov and a couple of the guys from Cadence.  On a whim, I typed in "Moshe Gavrielov" into Google, and was surprised to see that as of Monday Moshe is the President and CEO of Xilinx.  Congrats Moshe! 

BTW... if someone could tell me how in the heck the above photo is getting located in relation to this announcement I'd sure appreciate it - it's certainly not showing up in any of the Google searches I've tried.

FYI... The OVM is now available for download from the new OVM website. 

I'm really sick and tired of vendors making users jump through hoops to "register" for something that is pushed as being free.  I think the "Please have a [Cadence|Mentor] Representative Contact Me" buttons at the bottom of the 20 entry registration form (all fields required) is what has really pushed me over the top here.  Since Cadence and Mentor already have my contact info, I guess I'll be signing up later when I have the patience to fill out the form. 

Sorry, just couldn't resist the urge to show off my drawing skills courtesy of OneNote 2007 and a Lenovo X61 Tablet PC.

I was looking through my web stats the other day when I noticed something strange - I was getting referrals from the DAC homepage.  A quick glance at the site revealed that Cool Verification is listed as one of several "industry blogs."  Here's the complete list from the DAC site:

• Adventures in ASIC
• ASIC-SoC-VLSI Design
• Cool Verification
• Deep Chip
• EDA Blog
• EDA Confidential
• Eric's Blog for Work
• Gabe on EDA
• John's Semi-Blog

This is the first time I've seen the DAC site mention blogs.  A closer look reveals they've also added a discussion of blogging to the press credential requirements. 

Last year when I attended DAC I managed to meet up with John Ford, author of DFT Digest.  Perhaps this year I'll get a chance to meet some of the other folks who blog on the topic of EDA.

Writing this article got me thinking that it's just about conference season again.  First up February 19-21 is DVCon in San Jose.  Following soon thereafter is DATE in Munich March 10-14.  SNUG in San Jose, CDNLive in Munich and DAC will carry us out through the middle of the year. 

This should be an interesting year.  We're all still anxiously waiting for the release of the OVM library (shh, don't tell anyone) from Cadence and Mentor.  It's also a year that (in my opinion) will start to see an even broader adoption of SystemVerilog, and perhaps some surprises from Synopsys as well.