Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Verification

Any sports fan living in the US during the 70's and 80's will remember the dramatic introduction to ABC television's "Wide World of Sports":

"Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!"

I'll leave it to the reader make your own analogy between the image of the skier crashing that ran during the "agony of defeat" line, and the agony of bug escapes. The point of this post is to highlight upcoming events in verification that I've been involved with preparing to some degree that literally span the globe (hence, my decrease in blogging here, and only minimal micro blogging on Twitter):

CDNLive San Jose 2009
Building on the momentum started in last week's CDNLive San Jose program, the Verification track continues tomorrow with deep dives on OVM with ABV presented by Cadence Architect Sharon Rosenberg, followed by another techtorial on OVM Advanced Applications by Team Specman's own Brett Lammers. In short, in 1 day you can learn everything you need to know about OVM from two of the actual contributors to the OVM itself! (Specmaniacs: be advised that OVM e is a significant part of Brett's presentation; and do NOT miss Specman Architect Matan Vax's presentation on how "OOP Falls Short Of Verification Needs" this Thursday. Consult Team Specman's "CDNLive San Jose guide for the Specmaniac" for more details.)

2009 "ClubT" Series
The ClubT R&D-user group "interlock sessions" are going on in cities across Europe this week and next in the EU (more info posted by Team Specman here) As the founder of the ClubT series, I'm particularly proud of how these events have gotten R&D together with power users to share roadmaps and brainstorm solutions to literally *the* hardest problems in verification. (Here is a report and some snapshots from last year to give you an idea what ClubT's are about.)

Incisive Verification Seminars
This year the Incisive Verification Seminar series kicks off in Yokohama, Japan on October 21 (in 2 weeks)! This event series takes a step back and gives current and future users a bird-eye view of the Incisive Verification platform, in the context of solutions to common flows ("traditional" RTL functional verification, HW/SW, AMS, low power, OVM scalability, etc., etc.), and our roadmap(s) to address the changes these flows will encounter in the next few years (like how to deal with the growing number of billion logic gate chips that continue to appear on drawing boards.)

One final note:
Preparing for these events (especially the ClubT's, which have been "my baby") prompted me to recall one of my original blog posts on "Experiences on Marketing a Verification Library"; inspired by a challenge issued by EDA blogger JL Gray. Re-reading the text, one struggle that still remains with creating the content for any event is answering the audience's selfish-but-totally-fair question of, "what's in it for me?" in a "balanced" way. Here the term "balanced" is applied to the task of giving enough meaty technical content to the expected attendees (in the ClubT case, typically end-users and front line management) that they can go back and try on their workstations immediately, yet also provide enough of the "big picture" to put these capabilities in a proper context.

Unfortunately, the "big picture" is often derided as marketing fluff by EDA industry pundits. However, the truth is that all levels of the R&D ladder share the same big picture hopes & dreams for the benefits that EDA could bestow on their efforts. Paraphrasing, "I want tools and methodologies that can help me make the product I'm working on incredibly valuable to our current customers, and so visibly valuable that new customers will flock to it too; all delivered before our competition has a clue."

This is why you'll see in the ClubTs and other events we take care to show you the big picture right up front, before deep diving into the topic of the day. Ideally this big picture is aligned with yours. If it's not, I encourage you stop the speaker right there, and to trust us enough to share your vision and ideas about what's amiss, and how we might align our respective views.

Joe Hupcey III