CDNLive! Silicon Valley 2010 in the Rear-View Mirror

Well, we all survived another very busy CDNLive! event last week. Since I posted a preview beforehand I would be remiss if I didn't let you know what happened. The bottom line is that this was a really good show, with more than forty talks covering a wide range of EDA and EDA360 topics. The majority of these were presented by customers, with some additional sessions from Cadence management and technical experts. Unlike last year's largely "virtual" event, there was a great deal of interaction among employees, customers and partners throughout the day.

Robert Dwyer and Richard Goering have already posted excellent accounts of the morning's general session. It was great that Silicon Realization was the focus for the show, especially since my domain of functional verification falls under this category. A lively partner panel on "EDA360 in the Real World" provided insight into how the challenges of Silicon Realization are being addressed today. I was especially intrigued by the notion of "Design Lite" as expressed by Open-Silicon President and CEO Naveed Sherwani; see Richard's post for more information.

The afternoon was consumed by six parallel tracks of six talks each, addressing System Realization and SoC Realization as well as Silicon Realization. I spent all my time in the track with the five functional verification presentations that I previewed last week. The two talks from Medtronic gave a very good overview of their verification process for mixed-signal designs. These talks reflected one of my group's major goals, which is extending our metric-driven verification (MDV) flow beyond pure digital simulation.

I was very impressed by "Tips and Pitfalls for the First-Time OVM User" from Dan Steinberg of Google. Dan positioned his list of tips as the things he wished that someone could have told him when he started his first OVM project. It was the perfect user session: the sharing of hard-won knowledge with one's peers. I also enjoyed NextOp's presentation on their novel assertion-synthesis technology and a Cadence talk on UVM/OVM verification reuse. All five sessions had so many questions from the audience that the moderators had to stop the Q&A to end on time.

The day closed with the Designer Expo, offering free food and the chance to see solutions from Cadence and more than twenty of our partners. As during the rest of the day, there was a lot of interaction among all participants. It was a nice close to an enjoyable and stimulating day at CDNLive! Silicon Valley. Finally, a subset of the attendees visited the main Cadence campus the following day for detailed techtorials. Everything was well planned and well attended. I'm looking forward to CDNLive! India in two weeks and all the events we're planning for next year.

Tom A.

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