A couple of blog posts ago, I talked about the worldwide functional verification seminar series that we've been delivering this year. This has been a successful endeavor by almost any metric, but since it's taken a lot of my team's time and energy I'm continuing to monitor every aspect to ensure continued results. Last week I had the good fortune of traveling to Europe for seminars at a hotel in Grenoble and at the Cadence offices in Milan, Velizy (suburban Paris), and Bracknell (suburban London). I really could not have asked for nicer locations and better attendees.
With four cities in four days, it was a fairly hectic schedule though not nearly as bad as some business trips of the past. I was joking with colleagues that the trip was a series of planes, trains and automobiles, albeit with none of the frustrations Steve Martin encountered in the movie of that name. For example, I flew to Heathrow Airport, rode a train to Bracknell, and then took a taxi from the train station to the hotel. Then we flew from London to Paris, ride the train from Paris to Grenoble, and took a rental car from Grenoble to Milan.
So the pattern repeated, but with very few problems along the way. The only major delay was on the French TGV train, which stopped shortly after leaving Paris, sat there for the better part of an hour, backed up for some time to pick up a alternate route, and finally got back to the high-speed rail section well into the journey. A person in our compartment translated the announcement that the detour was due to a tragedy on the tracks so it would have been rather insensitive to complain about a delay under such circumstances.
Despite the fast pace we had the chance to experience some bits of European culture. We had the better part of a day to explore London, time for a glass of wine in a Parisian sidewalk café while waiting for our train, and a delicious Italian dinner in the mountain resort of Bardonecchia to break up the drive from Grenoble to Milan. I had visited all four of the seminar cities before multiple times, but none in the past few years, so it was a nice chance to reconnect and briefly rediscover some favorite spots in Europe.
Enough of the travelogue; how were the seminars themselves? I have to say that I was very pleased. We had full or nearly full rooms in all four locations. The audiences were interactive and engaged, which makes presenting much more enjoyable. There was a lot of interest in our expanded verification (VIP) portfolio and new design IP offerings, especially the titles added via the acquisition of Denali. Of course the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) was a hot topic, especially since the 1.1 version had just been released by Accellera the previous week.
The most interest was in the applications of formal analysis. I discussed the use of formal for SoC connectivity checking and the combination of formal and simulation to accelerate coverage closure. Both topics generated good questions and lively discussion during the following coffee break. I've enthused in several of my past blog posts about the promise of formal analysis; it is good to see that we are finding applications to deliver on more of that promise all the time. You can learn more about connectivity checking here and coverage closure here.
We're planning a few more seminars in the second half of this year, including Japan and some additional locations in North America. Please check the Cadence events page for details and registration information as we schedule these new events. I saw no comments on my previous blog post, so let me ask again to let me know if there are additional verification topics you'd like to see us cover or additional locations you've like us to visit. Thanks to all my colleagues and customers who have made this seminar series so successful.
Tom A.
The truth is out there...sometimes it's in a blog.