Cool Verification

Last year before DAC I wrote about the possibility of holding a birds-of-a-feather session related to blogging, but wasn't able to drum up much interest.  With more Cool Verification readers than ever this year and after some interesting discussions at DVCon I figured it was worthwhile to throw the idea out there again.  If you're a blogger or interested in the topic of blogging in general and are planning on attending DAC this year, let me know!  Or, if weren't planning on attending DAC but are interested in blogging perhaps this will be the event that makes it worth your while to swing by.  Possible topics for the session could include:

• For everyone, short technical talks about the things we write about on our blogs - verification, DFT, journalism, memory, EDA standards, etc.
• For the non-bloggers in attendance:
  • How to get started blogging
  • Issues involved with starting a corporate blog (especially relevant for CEOs wondering what this whole blogging thing is about and whether it could help your business)
  • Ideas on what your new blog could be about
  • Why Deepchip isn't really a blog ;-)
• For the bloggers:
  • How to track web stats and feed subscriptions
  • Best known methods for which software to use
  • How to deal with requests from PR departments, etc
  • How to cover current events on your blog
  • How to write articles that even the journalists will love
  • Using photography to enhance your blog
  • etc

I'll be working with a few others to contact those of you with blogs that we  know about in the coming weeks, but if you see this and are interested please post a comment or drop me an email at jl at coolverification dot com.

My first stop of the day was to sit in on session 4.2 - High Level Validation Models.  A few things caught my attention at this session.  First, and reminiscent of my experience last year at DATE was a comment made by the third presenter, Joao Marques-Silva from Southampton University in the UK.  The title of Joao's presentation was "Algorithms for Maximum Satisfiability Using Unsatisfiable Cores."  During his opening remarks, Joao mentioned that knowledge of SAT solvers was required to understand his presentation.  He continued: "If you don't understand SAT, tough!"  Eh?  Many of the talks last year had this type of strong academic bent.  I believe many of the session attendees did understand SAT, but for those of us who didn't the discussion that followed was absolutely meaningless. 

While DATE officially started yesterday with a full day of tutorials, today was the first day of the main portion of the conference.  The morning started out with the opening address, awards, and keynotes from Dr. Giovanni De Micheli, Professor and Director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and of the Integrated Systems center at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland (below top) and Dominique Vernay, CTO of Thales in Paris, France (below bottom).

I'll be attending DATE next week in Munich.  I'm looking forward to the conference, but unlike DVCon where I was able to easily plan out what I was going to do each day I've been completely overwhelmed by the number of things going on and have not yet decided what sessions I'll be attending.  Anyone have any specific recommendations for me?  Also, if you're planning on attending the conference or are otherwise going to be in Munich next week let me know! 

One other thing - anyone have any suggestions for good places to go skiing around Munich?  It looks like Garmisch is the the most conveniently located spot, but I have no idea what the conditions are like there at the moment.