SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP310: On Overview of the Upcoming DVCon Europe Conference and Exhibition with Dr. Mark Burton

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Daniel is joined by Dr. Mark Burton, the General Chair for this year’s DVCon Europe. DVCon is the premier conference on the application of languages, tools, and methodologies for the design and verification of electronic systems and integrated circuits. Mark shares his long history of involvement in DVCon with Dan. He … Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of Semiwiki, the Open Forum for Semiconductor Professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Dr. Mark Burton. Mark is the general chair for DVCon Europe. DVCon is the premier conference on the application of languages, tools, methodologies for design and verification of electronic systems and integrated circuits. Welcome to the podcast, Mark. Oh, thank you very much for having me. First, can I ask, what has defined your 25-plus-year semiconductor career? Well, it's a good question.

I started off many years ago, as you say, 25 years sounds like quite a long time now, really in pushing polygons back in the day. But, yeah, since then I've moved on and kind of concentrated a lot on simulation. But I was having a chat with a colleague and a friend of mine, the other day and we were talking about a little bit about you know what what is your role being in in the world and he was saying and I'm quite envious of his catch line he was saying that he brings people together and we'll come on to that later and we eventually concluded though what I do is disrupt things which is probably not the best the best title to have but yeah

I've kind of have a bit of a history of breaking things before trying to then mend them. So I'd say I'm a little bit of a disruptor, which, there you go, that's, that's just who I guess I am. But yeah, so since, since those long gone days, yeah, I got into standards particularly, and that's led me on to DVCON, where, yeah, I'm now, as you say, the chair. Great. So what led you to the DVCon chairperson role? I mean, what specifically interested you about this? So, as I say, I've been involved with DVCON for many years, in fact, since the very beginning of DVCON in Europe.

And I guess it was started very much with the intention of growing a community here in Europe around all of the Accelerar Standards and the one that particularly I'm interested in is the System C standards. And I've been interested in that for many years. terms of simulation and I got involved then with the technical program committee and for many years I was helping to to review papers which I still do and then I was asked whether I would be the chair of the technical program committee so I did that for a few years and then more recently yes I've taken over the chairmanship of the whole conference we do that on

a rotational basis actually so it's my turn as it were for the next couple of well for the last two years this year and last year it's been my turn and we try to rotate that every couple of years really to bring fresh ideas in that's kind of the disruptor I won't do the role next year for instance that will rotate rounds or somebody else I guess maybe I might do it again in the future it's been an absolute pleasure to to be the chair it's amazing to see how this this organisation is juggernaut that is DVCon happens as it were from the inside but yeah so that's that that's what's led me that's the path that led me and i would recommend that if

anybody wants to do this role then by all means get involved get involved in the technical program committee understand what the the breadth of the conference is and then by all means come and be the chair um but that's that's that's the story i suppose Yeah, I'm looking at the program. Great program. So what topics most interest you? So, yeah, my particular bent, as it were, is towards simulation and towards System C particularly. Though we've got all sorts in this year's program. I would draw the listeners' attention to a particularly fascinating paper by somebody who is applying some of the standards, including System C, to a medical domain where they are. simulating and building a device to, I think, regulate insulin in diabetics, which is totally fascinating just from the point of view of the medical application, but is also really fascinating from

the point of view of the application of the technology. And I guess we'd all agree that if there's anything that any of us can do that is going to help people's lives, then that's a net positive to the world. So papers like that really, as it were, like my fire, I very much enjoy reading them. I enjoy reviewing them and hopefully they will be presented beautifully as well. But yeah, in terms of what I'm interested in, I'm interested in simulation in general. I'm also pretty active in the QMU community and others. And I guess one of the things that has been really A growing issue over the last few years has been what has now been called a federated simulation. So I guess it was somewhat before COVID I was in a meeting and almost kind of randomly the people who are sitting in this meeting a lot of them knew each other.

But there just seemed to be two groups and nobody kind of commented about it. And then at some point during the meeting, somebody asked a pretty benign question about the availability of a particular sort of model. And one half of the room was like, well, that's not a problem. Of course, we've got that model. That's no problem at all. And the other half of the room was, oh my gosh, that's the most complicated thing ever. We can't possibly have a model like that. I don't know where we're going to get one from. And it transpired that these two halves of the room almost literally, didn't know about each other's existence. The group brought us together the topic wasn't about simulation, it was about something completely different and we we

then ended up having this long discussion about how we could possibly have missed each other in the world and how we could rectify that and how we could work closer together. It turns out that they use a very similar mechanism to us in System C and And their standard, which was SMP2, in fact, has been around for just about as long as TLM2. So this made me think, well, hang on, why is it that we've got these different people that we didn't know about? What's going wrong in the world? That we don't have a place where all of these people are coming together and talking. And in a lot of ways, that's what DV-Con is.

It's a place where groups like that can come and meet, but it's a particular subject, bringing simulations together, and it's something that I'm pretty passionate about and something that I've been trying to work with. So there is an Acceleral Working Group specifically dedicated to federating simulation, and I think it's a topic that's going to seriously come up a lot at DVCon because we really need it. and right now if you think about the the application areas that are most alive as it were things like automotive and stuff and aeronautics as well to some extent those areas are absolutely fundamentally based on connecting different components together and if we're going to simulate them we're going to have to connect those simulations together and we're going to need to be to connect simulations of real world things like the road or the weather or whatever it is along with device models and so on and so forth and doing that right now is complicated and different people

have different approaches to that and there are plenty of standards which address different aspects of that but getting those people together i think is probably the most important thing that we can do just simply from the physical point of view of having those people together having those people talking to each other that breaks down barriers that at least means that we know each other exists and whether or not we can solve technical difficulties to connect our simulators together is kind of almost secondary to go to the bigger issue of actually having the the human contact I think so to what to my mind DVCon is is that is that place it's

It's the place that we get people together. And, yeah, federating simulations is probably one of the most important parts of that in the I see. And so, yeah, that's what's kind of lighting my fire right now. That's what I think is going to be the most important thing at DVCON. Great. So, Mark, tell me a little bit about open source. Why is open source so important? Okay, great question.

Again, one of the things that I have been involved in for years is open source. I ran for very many years a small open source company and we developed System C and QMU infrastructure. That's now open source still and supported by Qualcomm. And yeah, I've been involved in the QMU community and of course the System C community, which itself revolves around an open source proof of concept implementation so open source is something that I think is really important to the industry at large the ability to stand on each other's shoulders I think is incredibly important I think some of the side aspects of that though right now are almost unexpectedly important so

I'll give you an example we're all currently suffering or enjoying AI and the ability to, you know, ask a little agent to go and do our job for us, which it invariably fails to do. But I'll tell you what, those little AI agents work so much better on open source software and open source projects than they do on closed source software, because they've got so much more that they can learn upon. So the side of it, and that's kind of, it's kind of obvious but it's also kind of a direct reflection of our own society right i mean it's it's a lot easier to stand on other people's shoulders if uh if the source code is openly available and again it comes down to having people communicate and talk to each other

and work with each other and develop things collaboratively um and again that's about the scientific endeavor and that's why we have conferences where you you publish and i think that's a good thing in itself. But yes, it's kind of surprising in a way that something like AI where you kind of think, oh, that's going to help my job, it's going to do a job for me or it's going to make things easier for me, actually works a lot better for open source. Now coming on to federated simulation, there, of course, the whole aim of the idea of federating the simulation together is that you're going to be able to connect these disparate bits of simulation technology. If each one of those simulators has their own private APIs, then it becomes an awful lot more

difficult to connect them together. So again, the notion is that if we're going to do this, the infrastructure, if you will, that connects things together will absolutely have to be open source such that everybody can can use it, but also that everybody can contribute to it. The other aspect of that, which I think is kind of interesting. So we have a number of standards already that are to do with communication, but also standards like IP exact that describe IP blogs. Very often those standards focus, particularly when it comes to interface. focus on specific interfaces that already exist if you will and the notion's always been well you know those things they don't change very often and that's fine and

and you know if we do need to add another interface we can always do it in the next revolution of the standard I think the world is moving on an awful lot faster than that if I start looking at the various different components that I might want to integrate something like a Carla car simulation environment or or a MATLAB environment or I don't know, very often those things have very specific and different interfaces and it's no longer I think adequate or even sensible to talk about standardizing the way in which you'll build that particular interface in the way in which we've standardized other things so I

think a better approach to that is much more of a quote unquote open source idea where what I have in mind is that items like interfaces like configuration parameters like whatever it is when they need to be standardized I should be standardized like software like a Git repository for for interfaces if you will so that rather than waiting for another standard review what you're actually waiting for is is somebody to to agree to a patch that you've proposed and while you're waiting for that you can get on and use the patch that you have proposed. Obviously that requires some degree of responsiveness

from the people who are reviewing code, but that's no different from any other open source software. So I think not only is open source software in itself a good thing, I also think that the techniques and the and the way of working that open source provides us with, it's also valuable across the board. Does that answer your question? question or does it pose more questions? I think for this context, it answers a question. You know, I'm a big fan of open source, so I agree with you completely. But, you know, let's talk about DVCon.

So DVCon is a worldwide conference and exhibitions. And the next one is in Europe. It's in Munich, Germany on October 14th, the 15th. You will be there. You're the general chair. And I will not be there, but hopefully some of our readers will be. We put a link to the conference in our podcast. so you can go to it there. And Mark, thank you very much for your time. Great conversation.

And hopefully we can speak again, maybe after the conference. Well, that'd be great. Thank you very much, Daniel. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.