Standards, Partners and Industry Collaboration Update

Join us at the 53rd Design Automation Conference

DAC is always a time of jam-packed activity with multiple events that merit your time and attention.  As you prepare your own personal calendars and try your best to reduce or eliminate conflicts, let me share with you some candidate events that you may wish to consider having on your calendar.  I will highlight opportunities to learn more about ongoing and emerging standards from Accellera and IEEE.  I will focus on a few sessions at the Verification Academy booth (#627) that feature Partner presentations.  And I will spotlight some venues where other industry collaboration will be detailed.  You will also find me at many of these events as well.

Standards

Accellera will host its traditional Tuesday morning breakfast.  Registration is required – or you might not find a seat.  As always, breakfast is free.  The morning will feature a “Town Hall” style meeting that will cover UVM (also known as IEEE P1800.2) and other technical challenges that could help evolve UVM into other areas.   Find out more and learn about all things UVM, register here.

Partners

The Verification Academy is “partner-central” for us this year.  Each day will feature partner presentations that highlight evolving design and verification methodologies, standards support and evolution, and product integrations.  Verification Academy is booth #627, which is centrally located and easy to find.  Partner presentations include:

• Back to the Stone Ages for Advanced Verification
  Monday June 6th
  2:00 PM | Neil Johnson – XtremeEDA

  Modern development approaches are leaving quality gaps that advanced verification techniques fail to address… and the gaps are growing in spite of new innovation. It’s time for a fun, frank and highly interactive discussion around the shortcomings of today’s advanced verification methods.

• SystemVerilog Assertions – Bind files & Best Known Practices
  Monday June 6th
  3:00 PM | Cliff Cummings – Sunburst Design

  SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) can be added directly to the RTL code or be added indirectly through bindfiles. 13 years of professional SVA usage strongly suggests that Best Known Practices use bindfiles to add assertions to RTL code.

• Specification to Realization flow using ISequenceSpec™ and Questa® InFact
  Tuesday June 7th
  10:00 AM | Anupam Bakshi – Agnisys, Inc.

  Using an Ethernet Controller design, we show how complete verification can be done in an automated manner, saving time while improving quality. Integration of two tools will be shown. InFact creates tests for a variety of scenarios which is more efficient and exhaustive than a pure constrained random methodology. ISequenceSpec forms a layer of abstraction around the IP/SoC from a specification.

• Safety Critical Verification
  Wednesday June 8th
  10:00 AM | Mike Bartley – TVS

  The traditional environments for safety-related hardware and software such as avionics, rail and nuclear have been joined by others (such as automotive and medical devices) as systems become increasingly complex and ever more reliant on embedded software. In tandem, further industry-specific safety standards (including ISO 26262 for automotive applications and IEC 62304 for medical device software) have been introduced to ensure that hardware and software in these application areas has been developed and tested to achieve a defined level of integrity. In this presentation, we will be explaining some of these changes and how they can be implemented.

• Using a Chessboard Challenge to Discover Real-world Formal Techniques
  Wednesday June 8th
  3:00 PM | Vigyan Singhal & Prashant Aggarwal – Oski Technology

  In December 2015, Oski challenged formal users to solve a chessboard problem. This was an opportunity to show how nifty formal techniques might be used to solve a fun puzzle. Design verification engineers from a variety of semiconductor companies and research labs participated in the contest. The techniques submitted by participants presented a number of worthy solutions, with varying degrees of success.

Industry Collaboration

Debug Data API: “Cadence and Mentor Demonstrate Collaboration for open Debug Data API in Action”  It was just a year ago that the project to create an open debug data API was announced at DAC 52.  Since there several possible implementation styles were reviewed, an agreed specification created and early working prototypes demonstrated.  On Tuesday, June 7th at 2:00pm we will host a session at the Verification Academy (Booth #627).  You are encouraged to register for the free session – but walkups are always welcome!  You can find more information here.

Portable Stimulus Tutorial: “How Portable Stimulus Addresses Key Verification, Test Reuse, and Portability Challenges”  As part of the official DAC program, there will be a tutorial on the emerging standardization work in Accellera.  The tutorial is Monday, June 6th from 1:30pm – 3:00pm in the Austin Convention Center, Room 15.  You can register here for the tutorial.  There is a fee for this event.  Want to know more about the tutorial?  You can find more information here.

Fun

It is always good to end the day on a light note.  To that end, on Monday June 6th, will invite you to “grab a cold one” at the Verification Academy booth and continue discussions and networking with your colleagues.  If past year’s experience is any guide to this year, you may want to get here early for your drink!  There is no registration to guarantee a drink, unfortunately!  So, come early; stay late!  See you in Austin!

And if you miss me at any of the locations above, tweet me @dennisbrophy – your message is sure to reach me right away.