Rob van Blommestein
ONESPIN
Blog: OneSpin Blog – OneSpin Users Gather In Munich
Even more than most other high-tech companies, EDA vendors rely on their users for many aspects of their success
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Of course, customers provide the revenue that fuels the business, but their influence goes far beyond that. Many features in EDA tools, and even entire categories of products, arise from working closely with advanced users. Even before traditional Beta-testing, selected users provide design examples and may have early tool access in parallel with internal QA efforts. The partnerships can be both deep and prolonged, sometimes lasting over several generations of technology and products.
OneSpin is certainly no exception to this rule. In fact, many users tell us that we provide a level of support and interaction that billion-dollar companies simply cannot match. We freely and gratefully acknowledge the key role that our users play in the evolution of our product portfolio and its underlying technology. As we have grown dramatically over the last few years, we have looked for even more opportunities for collaboration, both with our users and among our user community. In this spirit, we recently held Osmosis, our first-ever users’ group meeting, in Munich. By all accounts, it was a successful event, and we’d like to share some details.
The name “Osmosis” stands for “OneSpin Meeting on Solutions, Innovation, & Strategy” and also suggests a sharing of knowledge. We planned and structured the event to foster three kinds of communication. Key technologists from OneSpin provided updates for our users, several users gave presentations on how they achieve maximum results with our solutions, and we allowed plenty of time for users to share information among themselves. Attendees came from companies ranging from startups to some of the largest electronics companies in the world, and spanned from new users all the way to some of our most experienced customer IC integrity experts.
We are thrilled that three excellent speakers shared their experience working with OneSpin. Antti Rautakoura is an SoC/ASIC Verification Specialist currently on leave from Nokia to pursue his Ph.D. at Finland’s Tampere University. His talk on “Coverage Planning and Verification Management” bolstered our conviction that formal must be an integral part of verification planning and coverage analysis. Antti uses the OneSpin PortableCoverage solution to satisfy this requirement and leverages our unique ability to work with third-party simulators and verification planning tools.
Jürgen Dennerlein, Product Development, I&C Hardware Development Expert, and Platform Architect at Framatome GmbH, was the second user speaker. It’s hard to imagine a domain where verification and validation is more critical than in nuclear power, so his talk on “Equivalence Checking in the V&V of FPGAs for Nuclear Applications” was eagerly anticipated. Framatome uses OneSpin’s 360 EC-FPGA tool to verify formally that their FPGA implementations match the original designs, a key step to satisfy safety standards.
The final user talk was presented by Keerthi Devarajegowda from Infineon Technologies AG, who is also pursuing his Ph.D. at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany. “GapFree Processor Verification by S²QED and Property Generation” described how to find multiple instruction bugs, which occur only with specific sequences of processor instructions when register hazards are not detected. Keerthi and his team use OneSpin’s GapFreeVerification technology to ensure that the set of formal properties is complete.
In future blog posts, we will discuss these three talks in more detail. In addition to the user presentations, OneSpin’s President and CEO Raik Brinkmann gave a keynote on IC integrity and the OneSpin team delivered technology and product updates on functional correctness (design verification and equivalence checking), functional safety, security verification, and RISC-V verification. The event was capped by a delicious dinner at a classic Bavarian restaurant, allowing ample time for social and technical interactions by all attendees.
We would like to thank all those who joined us, especially our user speakers. We are considering options for future Osmosis events in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and would love to hear from you. Email me at rob.vanblommestein@onespin.com. We look forward to seeing to seeing you there.