Taken for Granted

Today I attended the latest meeting of the Silicon Valley branch of the DV Club. For those not familiar with the DV club (DV = Design Verification), it was started by Eric Hennenhoefer in Austin a few years ago. It now has branches in Austin, Bangalore, Boston, Bristol, Dallas, RTP, San Diego and Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley it meets about once a quarter for a talk on some aspect of verification. I first heard of this about 1.5 years ago when we were invited from Tensilica to give a talk about verifying our Video subsystem. The club has all the right ingredients to attract a crowd of engineers:

1. a free lunch
2. interesting speakers
3. did I mention a free lunch?
4. a chance to meet new colleagues and old friends
5. and of course, a free lunch

(Sponsors such as Cadence, Doulos, Denali, Silicon Elite and Obsidian pick up the tab for the venue and lunch (updated after original post, on Friday 20 March 2009, to correct list of sponsors)).

Today’s speaker was Brian Bailey, a friend and co-author of mine, speaking on “Is it time to declare a verificaiton war?” The place was packed out with about 130 people, filling the room to capacity (Eric said this was the largest Silicon Valley DV Club crowd to date).

Brian Bailey

Brian spoke about his philosophy of verification, drew some analogies to Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, and also spoke about three technologies that he felt had potential to change verification significantly:

1. Functional Qualification – as exemplified by Certess (now SpringSoft) Certitude
2. Raising abstraction – as exemplified by Calypto’s sequential equivalence checking
3. “Intelligent testbenches” – as exemplified by Jasper’s Behavioural Indexing

Brian’s slides are available here.

IF you live or work anywhere any of these branches of the DV club, and have an interest in verification, I recommend that you check them out. Sign up for their newsletter and get notified of meetings in advance.