DAC Perspective One Week Later

DAC in Anaheim last week was as busy as always, perhaps more so, and of course I arrived back in San Jose to a mountain of work set aside during the show and the run-up to it. But I have dug myself out enough to look back at DAC and make a few observations. First of all, I know that overall attendance was down but I was as busy as I've ever been there. Cadence was back at DAC in a big way, and there was a lot of activity and countless customer meetings in our booth and beyond.

I delivered all the suite presentations on "Delivering Predictable Silicon Realization with the UVM and Metric-Driven Verification" to interested and interactive audiences. Most attendees were familiar with MDV concepts and the OVM, although not all were completely up to speed on the latest features in our MDV flow or Accellera's UVM standard. I was happy to fill them in, and direct them to the OVM-UVM booth and UVM World for more information.

I spent a couple of hours talking about Silicon Realization in the GlobalFoundries booth, but I spent the majority of my time on the floor in the OVM-UVM booth. It was very busy indeed; we scanned as many badges on Monday as we did in all three-and-a-half days in last year's OVM booth, and wound up with more than double that across the three days this year. We had an excellent series of talks by OVM-UVM users and partners; the Cadence-Mentor updates, the presentation by the Accellera VIP-TSC chairs, and the "Meet the Experts" session were especially popular.

One casualty of my busy schedule is that I had very little time to walk the floor and so missed saying hello to some colleagues I'm sure were there. My impression of the floor was that the other established EDA companies had good-sized booths, perhaps not quite back to the glory days but quite respectable. It is always a good test of the health of DAC and EDA itself to see how many interesting new companies are on the floor, and I noted several that I targeted for follow-up after the show.

Finally, I have to comment on the Denali party. I am surprised by how many DAC reviews have said "the last Denali party" and "the end of an era." It's hard to believe that anyone could miss the EDA360 theme. Clearly this was really the first Cadence-Denali party and not the last Denali party. As our CMO John Bruggeman said from the stage, "See you next year!"

Tom A.

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