DVCon U.S. 2016 Tackles Pressing Design and Verification Issues

by Gabe Moretti
February 9, 2016

Within the EDA industry, the Design & Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) has created one of the most successful communities of the 21st century.  Started as a conference dealing with two design languages, Verilog and VHDL, DVCon has grown to cover all aspects of design and verification.  Beginning as a conference based in Silicon Valley, the conference is now held on three continents: America, Asia and Europe.  Both DVCon Europe and DVCon India have shown significant growth, and plans are well on their way to offer a DVCon in China as well.  As Yatin Trivedi, General Chair of this year's DVCon U.S., says, "DVCon continues to be the premier conference for design and verification engineers of all experience levels. Compared to larger and more general conferences, DVCon affords attendees a concentrated menu of technical sessions - tutorials, papers, poster sessions and panels - focused on design and verification hot topics. In addition to participation in high quality technical sessions, DVCon attendees have the opportunity to take part in the many informal, but often intense, technical discussions that pop up around the conference venue among more than 800 design and verification engineers and engineering managers. This networking opportunity among peers is possibly the greatest benefit to DVCon attendees."

Professionals attend DVCon to learn and to share, not just to show off their research achievements as a community.  The conference is focused on providing its attendees with the opportunity to learn by offering two days of tutorials as well as frequent networking opportunities.  The technical program offers engineers examples of how today's problems have been solved under demanding development schedules and budgets.  Ambar Sarkar, Program Chair, offers this advice on the DVCon U.S. 2016 web site: "Find what your peers are working on and interact with the thought leaders in our industry. Learn where the trends are and become a thought leader yourself."

Tutorials

As part of its mission to provide a learning venue for designers and verification engineers, DVCon U.S. offers two full days of tutorials.  The presentations of the 12 tutorial sessions are divided between Monday and Thursday, separate from the rest of the technical program so they do not conflict and force attendees to make difficult attendance choices.

Papers

Accellera has a unique approach to putting together its technical program.  I am slightly paraphrasing this year's Program Chair, Ambar Sarkar, by stating that DVCon U.S. lets the industry set the agenda, not the conference asking for papers on selected topics.  He told me that the basic question is: "Can a practicing engineer get new ideas and try to use them in his or her upcoming project?" For this reason the call for papers asks only for abstracts and those that do not meet the request are eliminated.  After a further selection, the authors of the chosen abstracts are asked to submit a full paper.  Those papers are then grouped according to their common subject areas into sessions.  The sessions that emerge automatically reflect the latest trends in the industry.

The paper presentations during Tuesday and Wednesday take the majority of the conference's time and form the technical backbone of the event. 

Of the 127 papers submitted, 36 were chosen to be presented in full.  There will be 13 sessions covering the following areas: UVM, Design and Modeling, Low Power, SystemVerilog, Fault Analysis, Emulation, Mixed-Signal, Resource Management, and Formal Techniques.  Each session offers from 3 to 4 individual papers.

Posters

Poster presentations are selected in the same manner as papers.  A poster presentation is less formal but has the advantage of giving the author the opportunity to interact with a small audience and thus the learning process can be bilateral.  There have been occasions in the past when an abstract submitted as a poster is switched to an oral presentation with the consent of the author.  Such operation is possible because the submitting and selecting process is similar and thus the poster has already been judged as presenting an approach that will be useful to the attendees.

Keynote

This year's keynote will be delivered by Wally Rhines, the 2015 recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award.  Wally is well known in the EDA industry for both his insight and his track record as the Chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics.  The title of his address is Design Verification Challenges: Past, Present, and Future.  Dr. Rhines will review the history of each major phase of verification evolution and then concentrate on the challenges of newly emerging problems. While functional verification still dominates the effort, new requirements for security and safety are becoming more important and will ultimately involve challenges that could be more difficult than those we have faced in the past.

Conclusion

Grown from the need to verify digital designs, verification technology now faces the need to verify heterogeneous systems that include analog, software, MEMS, and communication hardware and protocols.  Adapting to these new requirements is a task that the industry has not yet solved.

At the same time, methods and tools for mixed-signal or system-level design still need maturing.  The concept of system-level design is being revolutionized as architectures like those required for IoT applications demand heterogeneous systems.
Attendees to DVCon U.S. will find ample opportunity to consider, debate, and compare both requirements and solutions that impact near term projects.