Guest Post: OneSpin’s Successful Return to DAC

As you have read, Breker had an excellent Design Automation Conference (DAC) this year. Many other EDA vendors were pleased as well. Today, guest blogger Dr. Raik Brinkmann from OneSpin Solutions shares his experience:

After sitting out DAC last year, OneSpin Solutions was back, exhibiting and demonstrating our innovative formal assertion-based verification and formal equivalence checking solutions. Overall, we considered the 50th DAC to be a great success. From what we heard, we weren’t alone in our assessment. The exhibit floor was busy all three days and the technical sessions hopping. In general, most of the exhibitors were happy with attendance and thought DAC was worthwhile. No one knew what to expect, given the Austin location and the general health of the economy and EDA industry.

We’re pleased with the number of leads we collected from DAC and attribute much of it to our pre-DAC marketing and public relations campaign. We started upping our visibility around November last year and went into high gear at DVCon earlier this year. I highly recommend this strategy to all DAC exhibitors for next year.

The OneSpin leads collected over the three days offer a look into the demographic makeup of this year’s attendees. About 75% of attendees who visited OneSpin’s booth were from the United States and almost half of those were from Texas. Most of the other visitors hailed from California, while about 9% were from Europe and 8% from Southeast Asia and Japan. What may be most interesting is a whopping 86% of attendees who visited our booth were from large, well-known companies.

While we’re talking percentages, we estimate that we had floor demos going on for almost the entire time the exhibit floor was open. We demonstrated our Cloud Computing System introduced in mid-May with functionality provided by OneSpin 360 DV-Inspect and 360 DV-Verify. As part of this announcement, we invited DAC attendees to become Beta users and had loads of interest, including several designers who signed up on the spot. Approved project teams are accessing our cloud servers at no charge, less a minimal charge to Amazon for the cloud service, now through August 30.

Another demo of the OneSpin 360 DV (for design verification) product family highlighted push-button, automated formal analysis, advanced, coverage-driven property checking, SoC and IP integration verification. One other demo showcased the OneSpin 360 EC (equivalence checking) product family for ASIC and FPGA synthesis verification.

Renesas’ Toru Shimizu was a crowd pleaser, offering daily presentations in the OneSpin booth on how his team uses OneSpin 360 software. In addition, he presented “Formal Verification Applied to the Renesas MCU Design” at the DAC Designer Track Poster Session. Also worth noting was the demo in the Oasys Design Systems booth of RealTime Parallel EC that includes OneSpin’s automated formal equivalence checking software. Oasys is an OEM partner of ours.

EVE taught the industry about the value of attendee surveys conducted during industry events. We took a page from EVE’s playbook and did our own mini-survey that asked a collection of straightforward questions about verification usage. While it was a small sampling of DAC attendees, it provided some great insight, particularly given the demographics.

For example, only 20% said they were specialist verification engineers, revealing a tendency to what Gary Smith has called the “long, tall engineer” or generalist. Just 12% of those surveyed were focused on equivalence checking, while 15% are using both equivalence checking and design verification. Twenty four percent write a few assertions focused on specific checks in their designs, and 26% do not write assertions at all. Finally, 27% noted that they thought that their company could use a cloud-based solution.

The conclusion we drew from this informal survey is that verification companies, including OneSpin, should make sure they cater to generalist engineers as well as verification specialists, and provide a broad range of offerings that match the spectrum of verification requirements across the industry.

Don’t expect OneSpin to sit out any industry events again. We will be at several over the next several months, including a Xilinx Partner event, Verify 2013 in Japan, the Ninth Haifa Verification Conference (HVC) 2013 and ARM Technology Symposiums in Paris and Santa Clara, to name but a few.

Dr. Raik Brinkmann is a co-founder of OneSpin Solutions and was named president and CEO in 2012, with overall responsibility for leading the company and its business growth worldwide. He brings to this role more than 15 years of broad expertise in management, verification and industrial R&D, having served at companies in both Europe and the U.S. Dr. Brinkmann holds a Diplom Informatiker from the Clausthal Technical University, Germany and a Dr.-Ing. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Tags: cloud, dac, EDA, equivalence checking, functional verification, integration verification, OneSpin

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