Hitting the Town with DVClub

For those unfamiliar with the idiom, “hitting the town” or “going out on the town” means heading out to make the rounds of bars, restaurants, theaters, clubs, etc. It’s usually used in a city where such entertainment options abound. The topic of today’s post on The Breker Trekker blog is a particular club, DVClub, that packs in plenty of solid technical information along with entertainment. You may not have to go far to hit one; a DVClub event is likely to be coming to your city soon.

The history of the Design Verification Club (DVClub) is quite interesting, stretching back more than ten years. It started as an informal event for verification engineers to get together to share stories and talk about new technologies to help them do their jobs. You might have noticed that, unlike DVCon, the title means “design verification” and not “design and verification.” This gathering is intended for semiconductor functional verification engineers.

What happens at a DVClub event? Because the sponsors provide financial support, the event is free, including lunch, an excellent technical talk, and ample opportunity to network with your peers. Case studies are preferred, with hands-on engineers discussing how they addressed their toughest verification challenges. Other topics might include updates on industry standardization efforts or presentations from academia on novel new verification approaches. Here are a few recent examples:

• “100% Functional Coverage with Formal Methodology” (AMD)
• “SystemVerilog Interface Classes: More Useful Than You Thought” (ARM)
• “Design Patterns by Example for SystemVerilog Verification Environments Enabled by SystemVerilog 1800-2012” (Intel)
• “SoC Design Verification: Challenges, Innovations, and Beyond” (NXP)
• “Advanced Usage Models for Continuous Integration in Verification Environments” (Samsung)
• “Functional Coverage Collection for Analog Circuits” (Texas Instruments)
• “Verification Challenges: Past, Present & Future” (Panel of Experts)

It’s hard to imagine any verification team who would not be interested in one or more of these topics. Note that these talks occurred at multiple locations. Although founded in Austin by Eric Hennenhoefer of Obsidian Software, DVClub has developed into an impressive international series. Test and Verification Solutions (TVS) runs regular events in Europe, India, and China. We have been a sponsor of DVClub Europe for a few years and have presented talks on several topics.

We have also sponsored a number of the Silicon Valley events, usually held at the entertaining venue of Dave & Buster’s in Milpitas. In recent years, Paradigm Works has taken the lead on running the North American events and has expanded the scope of DVClub beyond Silicon Valley and its Austin roots. In parallel, Breker’s North American customer base has expanded beyond our present location in Silicon Valley and our own roots in Austin.

With this expansion, and the excellent job that Paradigm Works is doing, we are pleased to let you know that we have signed up as a full sponsor for all 16 annual DVClub events in the U.S. and Canada. This year, these include four each in Silicon Valley, Austin, and greater Boston plus two in Portland and one each in Research Triangle Park (RTP) and Toronto. The next event is in Austin on September 7, with well-known verification expert Ken Albin from Oracle speaking about “The Cost of SoC Bugs.”

We will be there in Austin next week, and at future DVClub events as well. Remember that they are free and always worth the time; you can find out more and register at the DVClub site. Wherever you are, there’s probably a DVClub coming soon to a city nearby. We look forward to going “DVClubbing” with you sometime soon!

Tom Anderson

The truth is out there … sometimes it’s in a blog.

Tags: acceleration, apps, Breker, cache coherency, coverage, debug, DVClub, EDA, functional verification, graph, horizontal reuse, multi-SoC, multi-threaded, multiprocessor, Obsidian, Paradigm Works, portable stimulus, scenario model, SoC verification, system coverage, transactional, TVS, uvm, vertical reuse

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