The evolving world of verification
Mark Burton, the new General Chair of DVCon Europe talks to eeNews Europe about the latest trends at the DVcon Europe conference and exhibition
The recent Design and Verification Conference & Exhibition Europe (DVCon Europe) in Munich, Germany saw a boost in R&D papers and a new development competition.
“DVCon Europe was as lively as ever this year. Our new-style technical panel really drilled down into details, and the keynotes gave us some real vision. Our first ever SystemC competition went well and the same high-level prizes will be offered next year,” said Mark Burton, the new General Chair of DVCon Europe.
“The feeling in the air is there is a lot of budget tightening happening but none the less the numbers were essentially the same, and I had a lot of very interesting technical discussion.”
- Design and verification in a fragmenting world
- Open source EDA challenge
- AI, automotive keynotes for DVCon Europe 2024
Open source was a growing area of interest.
“Open source is no longer a swear word and is being used by more and more people in EDA. There are so many interesting things happening, for instance with work on LLVM to generate synthesis, so it is increasingly being talked about,” said Burton.
“We saw expanding interest in Qemu for example and a fantastic paper on automatically extending Qemu to add new instructions,” he added.
“Every year there is more noise around open source EDA tools. I get the feeling a lot of people are trying their best to add open source around the edges of the tool flow to provide something you don’t get from other tools. It’s not going to replace the professional tools, its more about orchestrating the tool flow,” added Jakob Engblom, vice chair of DVcon Europe.
The evolution of automotive design and verification was also a key theme.
“AI, software and OTA is more important to the value proposition and that is new, that is a big shift and it means you have to think carefully about what the product actually is and whether it is ready to ship and ship new functionality over time,” said Engblom. “That is tricky to do, particularly with the requirements. Cariad [VW’s software spinout] pulled that point out strongly.”
“There is a shift in mindset going on. We’ve been through those before and they take time. That was the thing that came out for me the most,” said Burton.
There was an AI theme through the conference, both a paper on generating virtual platform models and supporting more AI on the vehicle
Engblom points to Mathworks using tools to model AI in any number of ways with a Matlab large language model (LLM).
“What I see as very interesting in what will happen for RTL tools based on this. You will have companies raiding their own databases for training data and that is concerning. It’s fine for a large company but not necessarily for a startup,” he said.
New languages, particularly Rust, were also more prevalent. “I view Rust as making me think harder about the constraints of the machine I am running on, its almost a step away from things like Python. I’m seeing it popping up in so many different places,” said Burton.
THhere was also a 50% increase in the number of research papers.
The Best Paper Award in the engineering category went to Vishal Chovatiya, Gabriel Rutsch and Wolfgang Ecker of Infineon Technologies for ‘Addressing Fixed-Point Format Issues in FPGA Prototyping with an Open-Source Framework’: while Francesco E Brambilla, Davide Ceresa, Jashandeep Dhaliwa, Stefano Esposito and Kostas Kloukinas of CERN, with Jeffrey Prinzie of KU Leuven, picked up Best Research Paper for ‘Virtual Prototyping Framework for Pixel Detector Electronics in High Energy Physics’.
- A reusable verification environment for a RISC-V vector accelerator
- The three body problem for ASIC design
- Clock Tree Design Considerations in The Presence of Asymmetric Transistor Aging
‘Formal RTL Sign-off with Abstract Models’ received the Best Presentation Award (voted for by conference attendees). Authors were Lucas Deutschmann (RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau), Osama Ayoub and Tobias Ludwig (LUBIS EDA), Wolfgang Kunz (Infineon Technologies), with Rohith Batthineni, Michael Schwartz and Dominic Stoffel.
DVCon Europe 2025 will be held in Munich on 14th and 15th October, followed by SystemC Evolution Day on 16th.
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