News

DVCon 2017 – report

2017DVConEurope_logo_WEB
Blog

DVCon 2017 – report

October in Munich for 3 days, would you?

Sunny, pretty… and interesting!


Two of our colleagues went to the Design & Verification Conference (DVCon) last year, and recommended it!
This year Alex and myself grabbed two seats on a plane to the 2017 edition!

It’s a sunny Sunday! On our plane to Munich, we admire the Spa-Francorchamps racetrack through the window as well as the pretty Alps… Once in Munich, we ‘commute’ on the S-bahn. At our destination, we go up the stairs and… Wow! Nice bright sun, in the middle of the city center… That afternoon we discovered a gem of a city, and even people surfing on a river. I’m not going to share all our adventure and pictures, but it ended with Bier und Würst!

The next two days, we attended the conferences. Big names of the industry, both tool-vendors and tool-users present their newest developments with respect to either Design or Verification : code and testbench generators, power-modes, control-loops, integration challenges, … Not just technical subjects were breached: some project-oriented topics were also presented. These covered topics from how to deal with late specification changes, over how to structure teams, to requirement driven development cycles… This was all very interesting!

Older HDL languages are still widely used but the world of Verification has changed drastically over the years. Bleeding edge techniques like SystemC extensions for AMS or a UVM implementation ported from SystemVerilog were very impressive.

In the numerous (sponsored) coffee breaks, free chat with newly encountered fellow engineers happened spontaneously. We discussed various experiences with Failure injection, the challenges of Automotive, the expertise required for Formal verification methods, or their various fields of use. At easics we are already looking into most of these topics ourselves and an extra opinion on these matters is always nice.

As an extra third day in Munich, we attended a Mentor presentation on HLS with various customer experiences and usages: Neural Networks, Video Encoders, and the impact of HLS on Verification (including formal methods) and planning.

It was very exciting to learn, meet, chat or even bump into known people.
Microelectronics is a small world sometimes.

Alex and Bert

Some impressions