Quick chat with Wally : Keynote speaker, DVCon India 2016

Walden C. Rhines

It takes a village to raise a child! Correlating it with the growth of an engineer, YES! it does require Contribution from many & Collaboration with many. While our respective teams play the role of a family, the growth is accelerated when we Connect beyond these boundaries. DVCon India is one such platform to enable all of these for Design, verification & ESL community. The 3^rd edition of DVCon India is planned on September 15-16 at Leela Palace, Bangalore.

The opening keynote on Day 1 is from Walden C. Rhines, CEO & Chairman, Mentor Graphics. It is always a pleasure to hear his insights on the Semiconductor & EDA industry. This year, he picked up an interesting topic – “Design Verification: Challenging Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”. While we all wait with excitement to hear him on Sept 15, Wally was kind enough to share his thoughts on some queries that came up after I read the brief about his keynote. Below is an unedited version of the dialogue for you.

Wally your keynote topic is an excellent start to the program discussing the challenges head on. Tell us more about it?

Our industry has done a remarkable job of addressing rising complexity in terms of both design and verification productivity. What’s changed recently in verification is the emergence of a new set of requirements beyond the traditional functional domain. For example, we have added clocking, power, performance, and software requirements on top of the traditional functional requirements; and each of these new requirements that must be verified. While a continual development of new standards and methodologies has enabled us to keep pace with rising complexity and be productive, we are seeing that requirements for security and safety are becoming more important and could ultimately pose challenges more daunting than those we have faced in the past.

In the last few years ESL adoption has improved a lot. Is it the demand to move at higher abstraction level or convergence of diverse tool sets into a meaningful flow that is driving it?

Actually, a little of both. Historically, our industry has addressed complexity by raising abstraction when possible. For example, designers now have the option of using C, SystemC, or C++ as a design entry language combined with high-level synthesis to dramatically shorten the design and verification cycle by producing correct-by-construction, error-free, power-optimized RTL.

Moving beyond high-level synthesis, we are seeing new ESL design methodologies emerge that allow engineers to perform design optimizations on today’s advanced designs more quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively than with traditional RTL methodologies by prototyping, debugging, and analyzing complex systems before the RTL stage.  ESL establishes a predictable, productive design process that leads to first-pass success when designs have become too massive and complex for success at the RTL stage.

The rise of IoT is stretching the design demands to far ends i.e. server class vs edge node devices. How does the EDA community view this problem statement?

Successful development of today’s Internet of Things products involves the convergence of best practices for system design that have evolved over the past 30 years. However, these practices were historically narrowly focused on specific requirements and concerns within a system. Today’s IoT ecosystems combine electronics, software, sensors, and actuator; where all are interconnected through a hierarchy of various complex levels of networking. At the lowest level, the edge node as you referred to it, advanced power management is fundamental for the IoT solution to succeed, while at the highest-level within the ecosystem, performance is equally critical. Obviously, EDA solutions exist today to design and verify each of these concerns within the IoT ecosystem. Yet more productivity can be achieved with more convergence of these solutions when possible.  For example, there is a need today to eliminate the development of multiple silos of verification environments that have traditionally existed across various verification engines—such as simulation, emulation, prototyping, and even real silicon used during post-silicon validation. In fact, work has begun with Accellera to develop a Portable Stimulus standard which will allow engineers to specify the verification intent once in terms of stimulus and checkers, which then can be retargeted though automation for a diverse set of verification engines.

Wally you seem to love India a lot! We see frequent references from you about the growing contribution of India to the global semiconductor community. Any specific trends that you would like to highlight?

Perhaps one of the most striking findings from our 2016 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study is how India is leading the world in terms of verification maturity. We can measure this phenomenon by looking at India’s adoption of  System Verilog and UVM compared to the rest of the world, as well as India’s adoption of various advanced functional verification techniques, such as constrained-random simulation, functional-coverage, and assertion-based techniques.

This is the 2nd time you would be delivering a keynote at DVCon India. What are your expectations from the conference?

I expect that the 2016 DVCon India will continue its outstanding success as a world-class conference, growing in both attendance and exhibitor participation, while delivering high-quality technical content and enlightening panel discussions.

Thank you Wally! We look forward to see you at DVCon India 2016.

Disclaimer: “The postings on this blog are my own and not necessarily reflect the views of Aricent”