There is a lot of buzz about SNUG lately. It is not surprising. SNUG’s traditional Tuesday night event went through a big transformation this year and it was a big hit for all participants. The original Interoperability Fair was transformed into “Designer Community Expo” by allowing Synopsys’ partners and suppliers to gather in seven communities (IC Design, IC Verification, IP, System Design, FPGA, Custom Design and AMD Verification, and Compute Infrastructure) and to present integrated solutions to Synopsys users.

Real Intent exhibited its automated formal verification product families at the SNUG Designer Community Expo, including: Ascent, for early functional verification, and Meridian for clock domain crossing verification. We also demonstrated the integrated solutions between our products and Synopsys’ VCS simulator. Our engineers were all smiles when reciting the event. According to Jay Littlefield, Sr. Applications Engineers at Real Intent:

SNUG this year appeared to be very well-attended. The vendor show area was easily 4-6x the size of DVCon, and had a much more open floor plan. This made it easy for people to mingle, identify vendors of interest, and quickly gauge the wait at the buffet lines. Most people we spoke to were there for very focused reasons; desiring to find solutions to specific problems as opposed to “just browsing”. This made it much easier to connect with engineers on individual issues for which we provide solutions.

We found a great deal of interest in our products from many different people. Nearly all engaged in detailed explanations of past problems they hoped not to repeat in future designs. We found a lot of interest in both functional verification and clock domain checking across the board. Interestingly, the level of detailed knowledge regarding CDC issues was definitely higher among engineers than years gone past, indicating a work force both more educated and more concerned about the potential issues these class of failures could inflict upon their designs. Many times we heard those magic words, “I’d like to evaluate your tool”, which is the justification any vendor needs for attending a venue like this. So all-in-all, it was a very worthwhile show and I hope we’ll be going back next year.

When asking Karen Bartleson, Sr. Director, Community Marketing at Synopsys on what prompted the change this year and what benefits they saw, she said:

We understand that the world is made up of communities and our industry is no different. We wanted to bring value to our customers from their perspective – from within their communities of interest. Taking the concept to the logistical level, we developed the layout and color scheme to make it easy for customers to identify the communities of interest to them. Customer appreciation was, of course, the biggest benefit. They expressed delight in the new concept for our event and obtained valuable information to take away. Our partners, too, appreciated the opportunity to participate in the Designer Community Expo which has a high quality audience. It was a means for strengthening our relationships with our partners and hence strengthening the seven communities.

SNUG, true to its name, has become a very focused and intimate event for the design community. Karen told me that more people attended SNUG worldwide than any other events in our industry. We hope that “Designer Community Expo”, with its success, will be extended to SNUGs at other locations.

Apr 9, 2010