DVCon 2011 Is Open For Business

DVCon 2011, sponsored by Accellera, is now open for paper abstracts and proposals for panels/sponsored tutorials.  This conference will be held in San Jose from February 28 through March 3 of next year at its usual spot in the DoubleTree Hotel very close to the airport.

DVCon has developed into the yearly gathering place for the elite in design and verification—and those who aspire to join the elite.  Granted, the economy in the past few years has hampered international participation, but the roster of attendees has nonetheless been notably impressive.

The value of DVCon is not hard to discern.  Attendees are typically free to attend sessions, view the vendor exhibits and to take part in impromptu technical discussions in an atmosphere that is exponentially less frenetic than, for example, DAC.  Of course, the sheer size of DAC by itself reduces the chance of “running into” former colleagues with whom one can swap war stories, but, especially for senior technical people, DAC often becomes a blur of customer meetings and intelligence gathering.  These activities are very valuable, but so is the ability that DVCON affords to sit in a quiet corner and discuss, for example, the prospects of UVM with a few industry cohorts.

Finally, I would like to point to a phenomenon that might have escaped general notice.  DVCon is the grandchild of the HDL conferences begun by VHDL International and Open Verilog International in the 1990′s.  As such it has always had a heavy HDL verification flavor.  This flavor is still very evident, and there will be  papers discussing, for example, the use of SystemVerilog in a comprehensive verification flow.  However, in recent years I have observed  more exploration at DVCon of the ESL space– especially around SystemC usage.  This is not surprising since design, modeling and, yes, verification using SystemC are becoming increasingly mainstream.

This trend towards more SystemC content was especially obvious at DVCon 2010, when the OpenSystemC Initiaitve (OSCI) informally dubbed the first day of the conference as “SystemC day”.  The morning of this first day was devoted to a meeting of the North American SystemC User’s Group (NASCUG), while OSCI gave a sponsored tutorial on TLM-based design in the afternoon.  Both events were well attended, highlighting the point that DVCon is “not just for RTL anymore”.