A Look at the Ongoing Functional Verification Seminar Series

Being a Marketing guy, one thing that I really enjoy is getting on the road for a big, splashy seminar series. For many EDA companies, that used to be a routine annual event with 30 or 40 locations around the world. We'd split them up and visit perhaps 8 or 10 cities apiece. The pace could be a bit brutal at times, sometimes literally five countries in five days, but seminars provide a great chance to get out of the office and see a whole bunch of customers at once. I've always enjoyed presenting but I quickly learned the added value of informal customer conversations at breaks and lunch.

The last few years have been a bit challenging for seminars as everyone's travel budgets have taken hits. Customers have been less likely to travel to regional events, so we tried to do more customer-specific "verification summits" at their offices. We also took advantage of the regional CDNLive! events with aligned seminars that reduced travel for both Cadence and our customers.  But this year we've returned to quite an active schedule of seminars, some aligned with the Cadence Technology on Tour (ToT) events and others independent for logistical reasons.

So far this year we've had seminars in Israel, China, Taiwan, Korea, India, Germany, Sweden, and Texas. I had the pleasure of attending the events in Taiwan a couple of weeks ago and was impressed by the attendance and the high level of interest in our technologies and products. The linchpin for the series is an update on the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) and the many ways that Cadence supports and leverages the standard. Depending upon the interest in a particular location, we cover additional topics related to state-of-the-art verification and how engineers can use the Incisive product line to be successful.

I'm writing this blog post to draw your attention to the upcoming seminars, specifically one being held in Chelmsford, Massachusetts next Tuesday, May 24. We have a busy agenda planned, including sessions on the UVM, metric-driven verification (MDV), debug in SimVision, new Specman/e features, applications for formal analysis, low-power and mixed-signal verification, and our expanded Verification IP (VIP) portfolio with the Denali products. There is truly something for everyone involved in verification; registration is available now on cadence.com.

We have many more seminars coming your way; registration is now open for France, Italy and the UK. Other locations in 2011 will include Japan, Silicon Valley, Southern California, Colorado and Minnesota. Please keep your eye on the Cadence events page for details and registration information. If we're not planning a seminar close enough to your location, or if there are topics you'd like to see not currently covered, post a comment and offer a suggestion. I hope to see you all somewhere, sometime in 2011 to fill you in on the latest and greatest happenings in functional verification in the industry and here at Cadence.

Tom A.

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