With another year of record attendance, DVCon has again proven that a functional verification-focused mix of trade show and technical conference is what customers need to get their jobs done. Here are some of the some of the highlights I took away from this informative event:
DVCon 2013 was a one stop shop for panels, papers, posters,
live demos, and tutorials on functional verification
* Great panels on Verification Planning and Drastically Improving D&V
Two panels at the conference provided valuable food for thought in their own ways. First, in regard to the Cadence lunch panel on "Best Practices in Verification Planning", EDA industry observer Peggy Aycinena wrote:
Sometimes magic happens at panel discussions at technical conferences, and that was the case mid-day on Wednesday at DVCon in San Jose this week, where the conversation was lively, entertaining and informative on the pedestrian, albeit foundational, topic of "Best Practices in Verification Planning." Ironically, the hour-long conversation did not appear to be planned at all, but to be organic and spontaneous ...
Granted I'm biased - but I have to agree whole heartedly. The panelists were generous in sharing their experiences with the mixture of art and science required by verification project planning, and I urge you to review either of Peggy's account of the panel or Industry Insights' Richard's Goering's in depth report.
Later that day "panel magic" happened again at the Industry Leaders panel on "The Road to 1M Design Starts". To everyone's delight, the panelists embraced the spirit of brainstorming how design and verification can be made significantly (think 20x, even 100x) more efficient. Sound impossible? One panelist gamely recalled that not many years ago there was a "software crisis" where the best software managers could expect was a net of 10 tested lines of code per day per engineer. Fast forward to the present, and teenagers with a lot of imagination but limited programming experience are creating money-making apps on incredibly complex mobile platforms thanks to very well thought out development tools and libraries. The panel challenged the audience to consider the lessons of such anecdotes in increasing abstraction and automation for EDA tool providers and their customers alike.
Richard Goering covers this panel in depth here in his Industry Insights blog.
* Apps as the new EDA paradigm
At last year's DVCon one of my product teams ("Team Verify") introduced the idea formal apps in our tutorial. (In a nutshell, a formal app enables usage of powerful formal engines "under-the-hood" by an engineer who has never used formal before, to solve specific problems.) At the time we were the only ones promoting this concept and offering the underlying product support. What a difference a year makes -- not only have our immediate competitors adapted this approach, but the "app" term was being applied to both formal, multi-engine, and pure dynamic simulation offerings and every thing in between. Of course, it's hard to be surprised by this given the EDA-related appeal is obvious: because apps are focused on specific, painful problems -- i.e. they are customer-centric by definition and in practice -- they are a clear win for both end users and vendors.
* The e/Specman Surge
After years of having waves of Specman-related abstracts be rejected seemingly out of hand, this year the assembly finally got to see what Specmaniacs have been eager to share with this verification community. One look at the posters by Meirav Nitzan of Xilinx (1P.21, Taming the Beast: A Smart Generation of Design Attributes (Parameters) for Verification Closure using Specman) and Horace Chan of PMC Sierra (1P.25 Maximize Vertical Reuse, Building Module to System Verification Environments with UVM e) and it's obvious that ‘e' and Specman usage are both thriving and they remain at the forefront of verification innovation.
Until next DVCon, may your power consumption be low and your throughput be high.
Joe Hupcey III
On Twitter: @jhupcey, http://twitter.com/jhupcey
Reference Links
DVCon 2013 Proceedings, http://dvcon.org/
DVCon 2013 YouTube playlist of speaker and panelist video interviews:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYdInKVfi0Kantj1U3H8pk9NkxFykT0rG
Richard Goering Industry Insights report: DVCon 2013 Expert Panel: How to Succeed with Verification Planning
http://www.cadence.com/Community/blogs/ii/archive/2013/03/05/dvcon-2013-expert-panel-how-to-succeed-with-verification-planning.aspx
Richard Goering Industry Insights report: DVCon 2013 Panel: 1 Million IC Design Starts - How Can We Get There?
http://www.cadence.com/Community/blogs/ii/archive/2013/03/01/dvcon-2013-panel-1-million-ic-design-starts-how-can-we-get-there.aspx
Peggy Aycinena, EDA Café: DVCon 2013: Best Practices in Verification Planning
http://www10.edacafe.com/blogs/whatwouldjoedo/2013/02/28/dvcon-2013-best-practices-in-verification-planning/