An evening full of Do’s & Don’ts in OVM/UVM with Cliff Cummings

Clifford Cummings (http://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffcummings) is a crowd puller – no doubt. Consider:

• Hot summer mid-day (2 PM start time)
• Bangalore traffic/center of city (potential peak traffic towards end time of 5.30 PM)
• A venue known/infamous for a “HUGE” area but no so frequented by hi-tech community of Silicon Valley of India, past events over there had history of terrible attendance

Yet there were close to 70+ Verification engineers at Cliff’s UVM/OVM seminar aptly titled as:

“Advanced SystemVerilog Tips Including OVM & UVM Tips”

 

It was indeed for Advanced System Verilog users as he had most of the slides on OVM/UVM. TeamCVC (http://in.linkedin.com/in/cvcblr) specifically its trainees, some 11 of them were there cherishing their stint at CVC (www.cvcblr.com) as they hear a world-class seminar and being a fresh graduate, making sense out of that was  a pride on its own. That’s the power of CVC’s time proven EIC training (http://www.cvcblr.com/trng_profiles/CVC_EIC_profile.pdf) that takes in a fresh B.E/M.Tech graduate and turns them to be most sought out Verification engineer in local market.

Madhavi Rao of Cadence (http://in.linkedin.com/in/madhavirao) has done an excellent job in making the event popular and driving it to customers. TeamCVC did their bit, by blogging about it via: http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=325 and also tweeted via: http://twitter.com/cvcblr – for those who believe (still) that Social Media is not engineers/hi-tech, there were more than 5 folks who told me at the event that they heard it via Tweets and they signed-in for the event!

Coming to the event technical content – A good detailed, 60-page write-up by Cliff is at: http://j.mp/gJegMP And for those who cherish/enjoy live-tweets, let’s not repeat all the hardwork TeamCVC had put in live-tweets during the event itself, see: http://twitter.com/cvcblr

The true success of the technical value was evident towards the end – during the High-Tea, almost every attendee had atleast one TIP to go home with (many with more than 1 obviously), I heard things like:

I would not use global_stop_request after run_test

I would not look at enable_stop_interrupt

etc.

Cliff cited JL Gray (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jlgray) for his interesting analogy of OVM’s TLM port-export to the famous Hollywood Blockbuster Avatar Movie. I am still looking for more details on that comparison as it wasn’t easy to catch that link during Cliff’s brief notes.

Cliff’s own explanation of port-export to a driving-a-car using steering-wheel was interesting as well.

Cliff’s session on handling end-of-test was the best pick in this event. Start with the following:

  initial begin : end_of_test_try

    run_test();

    global_stop_request;

  end : end_of_test_try

If you need more details, read: http://j.mp/gJegMP

It was indeed a nice evening with Cliff and other Verification geeks of Bangalore. Now, let’s look forward to how the Pune event goes, maybe http://twitter.com/punechips will provide us the live-tweets :-)