And the Doctor Cried, “It’s a Blog!”

Welcome to the birth of a new blog on EDACafé, “The Breker Trekker” from Breker Verification Systems. The term “Trekker” refers to our main product, TrekSoC, and its underlying Trek engine technology. We also mean to suggest “trek” as in a long journey with some challenges and many rewards along the way, appropriate for a small software company still early in our own journey. If you happen to be a Star Trek fan and identify yourself as a trekker, then by all means please become a fan of Breker, too.

Let me start by introducing myself, Tom Anderson, since I’ll be writing the majority of the blog posts. You can read a brief bio just above; I’ve been in electronic design automation (EDA) marketing for about 10 years after working in applications, CAD management, design management, and ASIC design. I joined Breker early last year (2012) as TrekSoC was poised to go from a product used by a small set of early adopters to a mainstream technology. That journey is underway now and I’m having great fun helping to make it happen.

I’ll fill you in more on the Breker history in future posts, but my main focus for this debut is to let you know what to expect. I like blogs that are personal, putting a human face on a company, while still providing useful information. I also like to inject some humor from time to time; some of my most-read posts during my time at Cadence were in an offbeat series on “real-world assertions.” Most technical articles are dry by their very nature. In contrast, the blog format is perfect for having a bit of fun, being more informal, and encouraging dialogue with readers.

Some of our posts will be technical in nature, focusing on some aspect of our products or the SoC verification challenge in general. Others will fill you in on what’s happening at Breker so that you know us a group of individuals and not just as a corporate logo. If my past experience is any guide, a lot of my posts will not be planned in advance but will be written to respond to events in our fast-changing industry. Of course, I will share this space with my Breker colleagues and likely the occasional guest blogger as well.

As we embark on this journey together, I’ll promise you three things. First, I will commit to a minimum of one new post every other Tuesday, with additional timely posts when major events occur. Second, I will do my best to make this blog interesting and worth reading. Finally, nothing reasonable will be off limits. Some companies prohibit their bloggers from even mentioning competitors or severely restrict the topics that can be covered. If I’m going to err, it will be on the side of openness, in service of meeting my second promise.

What do I ask from you, our readers? First, please subscribe to this blog so that you will know when new posts are available. As above, I will maintain a regular frequency so that subscriptions make sense. Second, please comment! Nothing makes the writer of an article or blog post happier than seeing comments, even if they strongly disagree. We know that EDACafé has lots of readers, but studying Web statistics is no substitute for hearing from readers that we stimulated or enraged enough to respond.

Thank you for tuning in. We’ll be back in two weeks, if not sooner.

Tom A.

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

Tags: Breker, functional verification, SoC verification, Trek, TrekSoC

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 8:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.