Cool Verification

DVCon, the first big verification-related conference of the year is now complete. Unlike in past years where I’ve spent quite a bit of time during the conference blogging about what’s been going on each day, I’ve decided this year (as you may have noticed) to do a series of wrap up articles instead.  Why?  One big reason is that I was able to describe many of the minute by minute details of the conference on Twitter along with many of my new EDA Twitter friends.  More on that in a future post (or check out Karen Bartleson’s post on her Twitter experience at DVCon). Another reason is that I wanted to spend more time taking in the conference itself as opposed to huddled in a corner somewhere writing up blog articles. If you have any preferences for one over the other please let me know so I can make adjustments if necessary at DAC.

In this post I’m going to discuss conference attendance. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on Formal vs. Dynamic Simulation, industry moves towards improving constrained-random simulation, my theory that SpringSoft should eventually buy Jasper, the Wednesday “EDA: Dead or Alive” panel, and the use of Twitter at #dvcon.

It’s only Monday and already there have been several interesting press releases in the wonderful wide world of EDA.  Here is a breakdown of what I’ve heard about so far.

• SpringSoft buys Certess

This is, IMHO, the biggest news of the day.  For full disclosure, SpringSoft and Certess were both sponsors of the Verification Now seminar series I presented at last fall. This acquisition means that SpringSoft will now have a new and unique product to add to their portfolio.  I would also suspect there could be opportunities for integration between the Certess Functional Qualification technology and the debug technology in Verdi.  Journalist Chris Edwards made the following comment in response to the news this morning on Twitter:

@jlgray Springsoft's portfolio is a bit of a smorgasbord but in this climate, is one of the few EDA cos that could do comparatively well

I guess only time will tell.  I know the folks at Certess are passionate about their technology and I’m sure they are hoping to push the idea of functional qualification out to a wider audience.  They ought to be able to leverage the marketing and sales teams of SpringSoft to do that.  They will also benefit from a larger pool of apps engineers who, with some training, will be able to support more customers as they ramp up on Certitude, Certess’ main product.

The next two announcements I’m aware of are from Cadence. 

It’s that time of the year again – DVCon starts this Tuesday, February 24 in San Jose.  First off, here is the list of sessions I’m tentatively planning on attending.

Tuesday

• Accellera Technical Committee Luncheon
• I’m skipping the tutorials on Tuesday as I’m not arriving in SJC until Tuesday morning and I’ve got meetings scheduled all afternoon.

Wednesday

• Prototyping: Where Hardware and Software First Meet
• Verification Methodology and Testbenches – I
• Increasing Functional Coverage
• Case Studies of OVM in Multi-language Verification Environments
• Keynote: The Techonomics of Verification
• EDA: Dead or Alive? (The old Troublemakers Panel slot, now hosted by Peggy Aycinena)
• SaaS and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable

Thursday

• Verification Data Management
• Case Studies – I
• Risky Business: How Do I Manage Risk in My Next Design Project?
• Case Studies – II
• Mixing Formal Analysis with Simulation: Why, When, Where, and How?

Note: If you’ve registered for the conference you can create your own custom downloadable schedule on the DVCon Zerista website.  The Zerista site is new this year and, in addition to creating a custom schedule allows registrants to network with other conference attendees.  It’s a great idea (if I do say so myself) but I think the scheduling mechanism could use some significant work, especially if someone was planning on using it for DATE or DAC.

Next, do you have a Twitter account?  One of the cool things in the pipeline for DVCon this year is that many attendees have signed up for Twitter accounts and are planning on twittering throughout the conference.  You can follow my activities at DVCon via my personal Twitter feed. Don’t understand Twitter?  Here’s a great video describing what Twitter is and why you might want to use it: Twitter in Plain English (thanks, Tommy!). 

The first year I blogged at DVCon (back in 2007) I spent a lot of time writing about each and every thing I did during the conference.  Last year I toned it down a bit, but this year I’m definitely going to focus my attention on one or two topics, as the nitty-gritty details will all be on Twitter. 

What else… oh, it looks like I’m going to have some company on the bloggers-as-press front (sorry Peggy).  Harry “The ASIC Guy” Gries will be attending the conference and will be blogging about his experiences over on his site.  Harry is also organizing the SaaS and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable I mentioned above.  Harry is a great guy and I expect to see some interesting material from him over the next week or two about the conference.

Overall, I’m most excited this year to meet up with friends and colleagues, both old and new.  I’m also hoping to learn more about how the VMM and OVM are being used on real projects and whether users are looking for new features to be added (including features related to interoperability).

What are you interested in learning from DVCon (especially those of you not attending)?  I’ll be happy to do some digging around if anyone has any requests!