One of the greatest values of a User Group is the ability to network with other users and compare the methods used with various tools from the vendor. The Jasper Users Group meeting will be held on November 12 and 13 at the Cypress Hotel in Cupertino, CA. The gathering will be especially interesting to designers, verification engineers and engineering managers. Attendees from around the world to share the latest verification best practices.

Mentor Graphics Corporation has updated its Universal Verification Methodology Connect (UVM Connect) to bring the benefits of it to the Open Verification Methodology (OVM) community. UVM Connect has been extended to allow it to be compiled to run with the OVM. The UVM Connect architecture facilitates easy connection with other environments beyond the initially supported UVM and SystemC. With UVM Connect 2.2, teams using OVM can connect with SystemC models and other environments as well.

Just after Synopsys acquired Virage Logic a few companies declared that the purchase would put Synopsys in direct competition with ARM and thus that the account was ripe for the taking. Any intelligent industry analyst, there might be a few remaining, would have immediately seen that the ARC core is not a direct competitor of the ARM family of products. But anything is a good source of rumor, and an opportunity to generate words that enable advertising revenue. Before I go on, I must confess that I am a bit puzzled by the lukewarm efforts made by Synopsys in inserting marketing and sales strength in the ARC product, but then again this is probably one reason that Aart chose Chi-Foon and not me as a co-CEO.

Zuken announced the immediate availability of version 14 of CR-5000, its advanced PCB and IC Package design software. The new version offers a number of significant productivity enhancements for greater collaboration in FPGA development and for high-speed design. Many enhancements have also been included in CR-5000 Lightning, Zuken’s leading high-speed design verification tool that enables rapid, accurate results, coupled with first-rate signal integrity, EMC and power integrity analysis.