Another successful DVCon U.S. 2019 has come and gone, but this year had a particularly interesting highlight. With nearly 900 attendees, a bigger program of tutorials, panels, papers, and posters, and a sold-out expo, the Best Paper award was even more prestigious than ever before. This year, the award was renamed to the Stuart Sutherland Best Paper Presentation. Stu was a leading Verliog and SystemVerilog expert, and he’d had a huge impact on the industry throughout his lifetime. In the past, he was the General Chair of DVCon U.S..
So it is in his honor that this first award is given—and it was given to our own John Rose and Adam Sherer (of Sherilog fame, for the old-timers in the audience), and Cliff Cummings of Sunburst Design, Inc. Together, they received this landmark award for their presentation of “Yikes! Why Is My SystemVerilog Still So Slooooow?”—the long-awaited sequel to the 2012 paper of the same name, sans “still.” Tom Fitzpatrick, DVCon U.S. Technical Program Committee Chair, had only glowing things to say about the winning team, citing “their [Cliff Cummings’] close relationship over the years and their combined efforts in the development and adoption of industry standards” as “particularly poignant” reasons for them winning the first Stuart Sutherland Best Paper Award. If you’re interested in the content of this paper, contact Adam Sherer or Cliff Cummings for follow-up.
In other DVCon related news, Tom Fitzpatrick was the recipient of the eighth annual Accellera Technical Excellence Award during the Accellera-sponsored lunch on Monday—congratulations to him!
Wednesday saw two panels—the first, “Verification and Compliance in the Era of Open ISA – Is the Industry Ready to Address the Coming Tsunami of Innovation?” looked at positives and challenges of RISC-V instruction set architecture. The second, “Deep Learning – Reshaping the Verification Landscape, or Business as Usual?” filled the ballroom full of people looking to see the next steps for AI and machine learning, and to hear about their future in the semiconductor industry.
Lastly, if you liked the short workshops present at this past DVCon U.S., don’t worry—there’s more where those came from! More short workshops have added to the program for next year.
And don’t forget to save the date—DVCon U.S. 2020 will be on March 2-5 at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose, California.