DVCon Europe 2024 – AI and More

The 2024 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on October 15 and 16, in its traditional location at the Holiday Inn Munich City Centre. This year there was even more talk of artificial intelligence than last year, and quite a few sessions related to virtual platforms. And lots of other interesting presentations and discussions.

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DVCon Europe 2023 – 10th Anniversary Edition

The 2023 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on November 14 and 15, in the traditional location of the Holiday Inn Munich City Center. This was the 10th time the conference took place, serving as an excuse for a great anniversary dinner. Also new was the addition of a research track to provide academics publishing at the conference with the academic credit their work deserves. This year had a large number of papers related to virtual platforms, so writing this report has taken me longer than usual. There was just so much to cover.

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Two Presentations at DVCON Europe 2022

DVCon (Design and Verification Conference) Europe is coming up in early December, in person, in München, Germany. The selection of papers and posters is finished, and the program is firming up. I am happy to report that I am part of two items on the menu, a personal record for DVCon! For more on DVCon Europe in general and how it has been in the past, see my previous blog post on DVCon Europe 2022.   

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Using FPGAs to Simulate old Game Consoles

A while ago, Ars Technica reviewed the Mega Sg, a modern clone of the old Sega Genesis gaming system. I stumbled on this review recently and realized that this is a fascinating piece of hardware. The Mega Sg is produced by a company called Analogue (https://www.analogue.co/), presumably named thus because they create analogues to old gaming consoles. The way this is done is different from most current “revive the old consoles” products that simply use software emulation to run old games. Instead, Analogue seems to have settled on using FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) technology to basically build new hardware that is functionally equivalent to the old console hardware.

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Embedded World 2019

The Embedded World in Nürnberg is still going strong as the best tradeshow for “Embedded” in the world. This year, I spent time doing booth duty and gave a talk in the Conference part of the event. There was an unusual high number of old friends and business acquaintances around, and it was a great experience overall with many fruitful discussions and connections for the future.  However, it seems that there is always something that goes slightly awry with my travel to the show…

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DVCon Europe 2018 / A Few Cool Papers

DVCon Europe took place in München, Bayern, Germany, on October 24 and 25, 2018. Here are some notes from the conference, including both general observations and some details on a few papers that were really quite interesting. This is not intended as an exhaustive replay, just my personal notes on what I found interesting.

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Prototypical – Good [Book | PR | Reading]

Prototypical cover frontI was at the DAC 2016 conference and exhibition in Austin, Texas, a few weeks ago. On the show floor, going by the S2C booth, I was roped in and got a paper copy of the book Prototypical. The copy was even signed by the authors Daniel Nenni and Don Dingee! Nice touch! The book is more than just marketing material – it provides a good overview of the origins and history of FPGA prototyping, and I found it nice and enjoyable to get more insights into this fairly important part of the EDA tools ecosystem.

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Microsoft Catapult – Real Interesting Research at Real Scale

microsoft logo 2014At the ISCA 2014 conference (the biggest event in computer architecture research), a group of researchers from Microsoft Research presented a paper on their Catapult system. The full title of the paper is “A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services“, and it is about using FPGAs to accelerate search engine queries at datacenter scale. It has 23 authors, which is probably the most I have ever seen on an interesting paper. There are many things to be learnt from and discussed about this paper, and here are my thoughts on it.

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