At DVCon this year, there were two panels that both identified a major issue facing our industry. The first panel was titled, “What keeps you up at night?” and the second panel “Ever-Onward!: Minimizing Verification Time and Effort. I listened to the first panel, and moderated the second one. One of the biggest take-aways for me, and this came as a surprise is that both the end users and the EDA companies actually feel that education, at all levels, is perhaps one of the biggest problems in the industry today.

On the first panel Victor Melemed – director of engineering for Ambarella said “Time to market is the #1 issue. The biggest impact on this is the quality of the people, then comes having good tools and methodologies. Universities are struggling to create students with the right skills” Jim Crocker – VP Engineering and founder at Paradigm Works added “We see lots of resumes. Students do not have adequate SW training. They do not have basic knowledge of Object-Oriented techniques. They have too much theory and not enough practice. Because of these issues we are not likely to hire college grads.”

Then on the second panel Shawn McCloud - HLS product line director at Mentor Graphics said that the reason why new technologies take so long to get established is because of the time and manner in which people get trained. He cited the transition from gate to register transfer levels of abstraction and said that the whole industry would become more productive if we could teach them transaction level techniques – but that it would probably take a long time. Ran Avinun - Product Marketing Director at Cadence agreed saying that even though they invest a lot of time and money in this, it never seems to be enough, and that at the same time customers are unwilling to pay for quality training or education. Rajeev Ranjan – CTO at Jasper lives and breathes this problem with informing people about formal verification. He even disagreed with other panelist when he said that formal tools no longer required a PhD to use them and that if they still believed this, then they too needed to be reeducated.

For both sides of the fence to agree, it must be a real problem – and so perhaps the biggest gain that many designers could make is to continue to invest in their own education. Even better would be for their companies to require it. But as JL Gray - Verification Consultant at Verilab said, engineers do not in general get compensated based on how good they are or how much knowledge they have.

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Brian Bailey - keeping you covered