A Preview of Verification Sessions at CDNLive! Silicon Valley

As Cadence followers well know, our annual worldwide series of CDNLive! events is a big deal both for us and for our customers. We work hard to get the best talks into the program, combining customer case studies, technical updates from Cadence experts, and the occasional partner presentation. As you might imagine, we always receive more abstracts than we can fit into the slots available, which allows the program committee to be selective.

As you might also imagine, there can be quite a bit of internal competition among the different Cadence product groups to get the most abstracts submitted and the most talks selected for the final program. This competition and the selection process ensure a high-quality program. I'm pleased to report that the functional verification team did well this year in terms of working with customers and partners to submit excellent abstracts, many of which were accepted, for CDNLive! Silicon Valley. Since the event is next Tuesday (October 26) I'm devoting this blog post to a quick summary of these sessions:

As you can see, Medtronic generously signed up to present two customer case studies that reflect the extraordinary verification challenges for medical devices. The first covers a wide range of Cadence products linked by our unique metric-driven verification (MDV) approach. This session discusses how their team creates effective verification plans and collects relevant metrics to be reported against the plans. The second session describes how Medtronic uses metrics for closed-loop verification, but focuses specifically on the links from block-level analog and digital verification to system-level mixed-signal verification.

Many advanced projects today use the Open Verification Methodology (OVM) to support advanced verification techniques and foster reusability. Google's session is a must-see for anyone taking the initial steps into advanced verification with the OVM or its direct successor, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) standard from Accellera. A later Cadence session on verification reuse addresses specifically how the OVM and the UVM support reuse of verification components between projects or even between companies.

Our Connections Program partner NextOp presents their solution for automatic assertion creation, offering real hope to project teams who want to use assertion-based verification but have trouble getting their engineers to write assertions. We have a related techtorial on using assertions in a metric-driven verification flow that will be presented on the main Cadence campus the day after CDNLive! October 27 also features the Silicon Valley debut of a techtorial on advanced MDV verification with e and/or SystemVerilog that has received rave reviews in previous locations.

Note that these are just the sessions that my team helped drive with customers and partners; the program also includes additional sessions and techtorials on mixed-signal verification, use of the OVM at the system level, verification of low-power designs, and simulation acceleration of UVM-based verification environments. Finally, we will have a verification overview available on demand in the Designer Expo. If you're unable to attend in person, note that many of the sessions will be recorded and later available online. Thanks to all of you who have interest in the verification space and who have supported our many CDNLive! events!

Tom A.

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