harry … the ASIC guy

I’d like to update you on some new panel members for the SaaS and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable and also give you some highlights from DVCon Day 1.

As previously reported, the roundtable will be held on Wednesday Feb 25th at 6:30pm in the Monterey/Carmel Rooms. We’ve picked up 2 additional panelists, Jean Brouwers and Bill Guthrie. Jean is an EDA industry veteran heavily into cloud computing and SaaS. Bill is Executive Vice President and Co-founder of Numetrics, a company that delivers its products using the SaaS model. This brings the total number of panelists to 7, so we should have many perspectives represented.

Here’s an update on DVCon Day 1:

Attendance at DVCon is down significantly this year. I don’t have exact numbers, but I’ve heard estimates on the order of half of last year. (Correction: By Day 3, there were 650 attendees which is ~80% of last year). Obviously the economy is a big factor. The exhibits session was probably 75% vendors and 25% attendees.

Lunch for approximately 150 attendees was sponsored by Accellera and included an overview of ongoing committee activities.and some informal polls on usage of Accleera standards. According to David Lin’s estimates OVL: 25%, UCIS: 40%, UPF: 10%, AMS: 2%, ITC: 5%, OCI: 2%, VHDL: 15%, SV: 80%, PSL: 10%. At one point the audience was asked how many had participated in the recent OVL survey and 1 person raised his hand.

I did not attend either the morning or afternoon tutorials due to work commitments in the morning and time spent at the exhibits in the afternoon. Some of the companies I spent time with include Gate Rocket, Achilles Test, and Synopsys. I’ll have some write ups on some of these visits shortly.

Finally, you can follow some of the live action on Twitter.

harry the ASIC guy

Considering what I’ve been hearing about the status of the Accellera VIP Subcommitee activity regarding OVM / VMM integration, I was rather surprised to see the following synchronized press releases from Mentor and Cadence yesterday:

• Mentor Solution for OVM Reuse of Legacy VMM Code
• Cadence Open Source OVM Adoption for VMM Users

As I understand, the Accellera VIP Subcommittee has just recently begun tackling the real crux issues regarding integrating the 2 methodologies such as:

• Casting of disparate types
• Synchronization of the simulation phases
• Message reporting

My speculation is that Mentor and Cadence are just now formally announcing the availability of the “fixed up” VMM code that had previously leaked out in a blog post by JL Gray.

Does anyone out there know what’s really in this release? It would be good to hear directly from the vendors on this.

How about OVM on VCS? Has anybody been able to get that working?

harry the ASIC guy

Not to be outdone, but with much less fanfare and ballyhoo than Synopsys’ donation of its Verification Methodology Manual (VMM) class library to the Accellera Verification IP (VIP) Technical Subcommittee, Mentor Graphics last week donated it’s Unified Coverage Database (UCDB) to the Accellera Unified Coverage Database Interoperability (UCIS) Technical Subcommittee.

Although not as hot a topic in the press and in the blogosphere, this represents a firm step forward in the standardization of the overall coverage driven verification methodology, whether you pray from the OVM or from the VMM hymnal. Whereas ratified or defacto standards already exist for the testbench languages, the requirements and coverage capture tools and formats are still proprietary to each of the 3 major vendors. This prevents the verification management tools of one vendor from being used with another vendor’s simulator. Having a UCDB standard will facilitate portability and enable more innovative solutions to be built by third parties on top of this standard.

Although Synopsys and Cadence have their own unique UCDB format, the basic elements of this standard should be much easier to agree upon without the political wrangling slowing the VIP subcommittee. I also think this is an opportunity for Synopsys, Mentor, and Cadence to show that they really can cooperate for the benefit of their customers and win back some of the goodwill lost in the OVM vs. VMM battle

harry the ASIC guy