Coffee Talk with Srini

Hi Readers, 

As mentioned earlier I am rolling out my first coffee talk with Srinivasan Venkataramanan, Please find the short Bio below.

Srinivasan Venkataramanan
Entrepreneur and Technology Evangelist in VLSI
Chief Technology Officer, CVC

About Srinivasan:

Srini, as he is more known as, is a technology evangelist and a passionate engineer. With over 18 years of experience in VLSI industry, Srini has published several books, papers, articles etc.  He has presented at various technical events across the globe. His areas of interest are the advanced verification solutions and methodologies such as SystemVerilog, UVM, OVM, VMM, Assertion-Based Verification, formal verification etc. Since 2009 Srini has been an entrepreneur in EDA and semiconductor domains.

LinkedIn Profile: http://in.linkedin.com/in/svenka3

Coffee Talk:

Vikas: How did you start your career?

Srini:  First of all, glad to be speaking with an enthusiastic, energetic, passionate engineer.On my career – right from my engineering days (Bachelor degree) I was clear to do pursue a specialization. I started my GATE exam preparation as the way to higher studies right from 2^nd year of my B.E. The reason I am telling your readers this is to highlight the importance of long and sustained efforts needed to make it big in this industry. Once I got my GATE score well above the rest, I had the opportunity to join any IIT/IISc. I even joined at IIT-Madras/Chennai to begin with. Then came a pleasant surprise from IIT-Delhi regarding a new VLSI program starting in 1996 there (called VDTT). It was my mother Smt. V. Parvathi who took great efforts to explore that VLSI is and what the future for that field is; having come from a small town of Mayiladuthurai in Tamilnadu, I could not imagine the value of VLSI back then. My mother enquired with her office colleagues and came back saying we should strive for this. VDTT program at IIT-Delhi is clearly the most sought out programs for engineers across India as it is a perfect blend of EE-CS and CARE (Centre for Applied Research in Electronics). Such an interdisciplinary program for VLSI is perfect as it offers engineers a wide perspective of VLSI domain from deep micron electrical issues to core digital electronics. On the CS front it covers CAD of digital systems, computer architecture, algorithms and data-structure, graph theory etc. Involvement of CARE enables researchers to go deeper in fabrication, packaging etc. Though I sound like marketing for VDTT – I want young engineers reading this blog to understand that VLSI is a vast field and choosing the right place to study is key to their long career in VLSI. Now if I look back at all my projects in the industry, almost everything had a beginning at IIT-Delhi. This is wonderful as many engineers in India complain that what they study is not what they work-on. Fast forward to 2016-17, I am using many of the CS concepts picked up during IIT-D days in our new start-up VerifWorks (http://www.verifworks.com) to develop innovative EDA products.

Once in VDTT, my VLSI career took off very well with my Master’s thesis done at Philips Semiconductors, Albuquerque, USA. My first job was at Philips, Netherlands at the heart of Natlab (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_Natuurkundig_Laboratorium). Then I decided to return to India and worked with an exciting start-up named Realchip communications at Chennai, whilst my wife (Ajeetha) was pursuing her M.S by research at IIT-Madras. The engineer in me pushed me to visit IIT-M labs often to see how research is done.  Ajeetha was working on some novel data acquisition prototype and it was amazing how much we could see in boards and systems sitting at the labs of IIT’s here. I started to develop passion towards Verification at Realchip thanks to my mentor Mr. Ramnath who showed me that a complex BFM based SoC Verificaiton environment can be coded in plain Verilog back in 2000-2001! I moved on to using Specman at Intel and SystemVerilog at Synopsys and then to my own ventures since 2009!

Vikas: What are the factors that motivated you to start CVC?

Srini: Having started working at Europe, I got exposed to the deep passion and dedication professionals there have towards their career; it was not for money only that they worked (Recall that in Europe many taxi drivers earn almost equal salary as engineers at Philips). The other big urge in me was to give back something to the society in India. Another big role model for me is my father Sri. K. Venkataramanan. Read more on how he inspired me to become an engineer in at a partner blog “What inspired you to become an engineer?” (https://www.aldec.com/en/company/blog/89--what-inspired-you-to-become-an-engineer).

During my Realchip days I used to contribute to several online technical forums in VLSI. Having analyzed the type of questions budding engineers in India were asking at that point in time, I realized that we need a distilled version of VDTT (@ IIT-Delhi), affordable for all and approachable by many (not just few elite who could clear GATE etc.). I for one believe that skills can be horned through sustained efforts even by an average engineer (provide he/she is motivated to do so).

To be honest, I did not start CVC, it is Ajeetha who did it back in 2004. She did it as she was working as independent consultant for many EDA companies across the globe and felt a need to expand the resource pool. Back in those days we used to hunt down any engineer who could spell “Verilog/VHDL”, literally. So CVC started of an elite group of “Consultants” and hence the name “Contemporary Verification Consultants” (CVC).

I joined CVC in 2009 after my Synopsys stint as I felt a strong need to impart my 13+ years of learning to wider engineering community in India and abroad. I always believed in “Knowledge grows when shared”. In my native language Tamil, there was a great poet and freedom fighter named Bharathiyaar. Some of his songs are great motivation for me, especially the one that goes like below:

English summary: Won't you give me the strength to live as a contributor to my Mother-land?

For non-Tamil readers, below is a link with some translation to English:

http://bhaarathiyaar-kavidhaigal.blogspot.in/2013/03/nalladhor-veenai.html

Sorry if that sounds like a diversion to this topic, but to me these lines keep ringing in my ears and keep motivating me to do more to disseminate whatever little I learnt through my great mentors, teachers et al. And I hope some of your readers will develop a similar inclination towards our great culture and literature and lead a meaningful life.

Vikas: Few insights about CVC Training's?

Srini: It is interesting that many across the globe associate CVC with high quality training solutions. As I mentioned earlier, CVC was started as a consulting firm to offer EDA services. During 2009 when I joined CVC, my main motivation was to increase the employability of young engineers in India through a 6-month finishing school in VLSI. Looking back, we have clearly achieved that in great style. I am proud to say this as my main contribution to CVC.

We also offer short term courses to working professionals in many topics related to VLSI Design and Verification. According to recent internal count, we have close to 50 different training offerings! That’s a lot for an indigenous company to achieve in 12+ years.

We have so far trained over a whopping 10,000 engineers in this domain across the globe. We have expanded to USA (Bay area, Austin, East Coast), Europe (Germany, Poland) and Southeast Asia (Vietnam).

We are the only training company from India to have done this in VLSI.

As a gift to this wonderful community in Bangalore, we also offer several free training – a notable one being a series of free, short sessions on selected topics that we offer around Dec every year – to mark our founder’s day. For 2016-17 we have a great list lined up at http://tinyurl.com/free-uvm-cvc

Another information that some of your readers may benefit is the free training that we offer to various academic institutions via our Go2UVM portal http://www.go2uvm.org/resources/free-go2uvm-training/

Vikas: What is the motto to start VerifWorks/Labs/News venture as a separate entity besides CVC?

Srini: CVC is now well established as a global training vendor in VLSI Design Verification. Just like how grow a baby to a child and then an adult, we believe CVC is now on its own. CVC’s focus continues to be global and local training with its own growth targets.

Over the years we have developed several niche products in EDA and we need a new entity to see its deployment. VerifWorks, a product based company develops products, offer value added consulting along with our tools to our customers.

Also, as you are well aware, CVC has been prolific in publishing. We have written several articles at EETimes, DAC, DVCon etc. We have co-authored several books in Assertions (SVA, PSL), VMM etc. We have also been at the center stage of bringing big technical events like DVCon to India. We have contributed to all DVCon events across the globe since 2006 if my memory serves right. Especially in 2016 we have delivered UVM tutorial at USA and Europe (Germany) events. Our team had 4 papers in DVCon India 2016. With so much activity around publishing it is a natural next step for us to spin these off to a new venture named VerifNews. As you may appreciate, writing and publishing is a different skill-set than training or product development.

Vikas: How CVC is contributing to the VLSI ecosystem?

Srini:  CVC has been based solely out of India to keep our tricolor flag flying HIGH! We are proud to be an Indian company making waves across the globe. Keeping the local ecosystem in mind, we have worked hard and brought an Indian edition of our SVA book(s) via http://verifnews.org/publications/books/

As I mentioned earlier, we offer free training to local academia on UVM via our Go2UVM.org site.

Our contributions to bringing DVCon to India has been well known and deeply appreciated by all stakeholders. Mr. Dennis Brophy, Director of Strategic Business Development, Mentor Graphics acknowledged CVC’s value in DVCon India - http://tinyurl.com/cvc-dvcon

Vikas: About DVTalk?

Srini: Given the highly energetic Indian engineering ecosystem, we believe a yearly event like DVCon while great, is insufficient and too small to accommodate all. Hence we initiated more informal, high frequent event named DVTalk. We have held successful events across southern states in India and Mumbai so far. We hope to continue that with contributions by emerging technical leaders like yourself!

Vikas: Is VLSI domain seeing a dead-end career?

Srini: Absolutely not! It is growing bigger into a merger of embedded and VLSI in the form of IoT, automotive etc. If you define VLSI as going lower and lower in geometry of transistors, clock speed etc. yes there are some slow-downs. However VLSI as a field is critical for our life time with huge growth of mobile phones, tablets, digital India movement etc. The convergence of safety, security and VLSI will be a big push for this industry in near future.

Vikas: Where do you see CVC and yourself will be after 5 years?

Srini: Well, I am bad at predictions. I believe strongly in hard-work, sustenance  and passion. So, for sure we will be around rocking in 5 years. As far as an individual – I will be happy to see myself mentoring emerging local leaders, entrepreneurs etc.

 Vikas: What projects you are currently working on?

Srini: We recently released a first version of our DVCreate PSS (Portable Stimulus Standard), we are collecting feedback from early stage customers. We will sure be updating with all the feedback hopefully by DVCon US 2017 timeframe.

Vikas: What do you do when you are not working?

Srini: I must confess that I am a workaholic and love my work. But I also like many other things such as playing with my lovely kids. I am a deep listener of Indian classical music, primarily Carnatic (Though recently I started listening Hindustani as well, albeit much less do I understand that). I love swimming and cycling though I don’t do them often. I have keen interest in spirituality and Hindu religion.

Vikas: Whom do you love more, your parents, friends, spouse, kids, siblings, yourself?

Srini: All! Yes, it is difficult, but that’s me!

Vikas: About Mergers, Acquisitions - Is this good for VLSI Industry?

Srini:  I believe so. Though I am not an expert in this domain, but as I mentioned earlier the field of VLSI is expanding and such mergers in long run should be good. However, for short term, we do see issues with EDA start-ups like ours (VerifWorks), but we are augmenting that with services for now.

Vikas: Your advice to the budding VLSI engineers?

Srini: Work hard, play hard! Be passionate about your chosen field. Stay technical if you can (I am still hands-on – if I don’t code or write for a week I feel horrible). I see the attitude of budding engineers needing to be lot better – don’t compare yourself with a Uber/Ola driver – he/she may make more money in the beginning but you are an ENGINEER and will achieve much bigger things in life if you stay focused.

Especially in India there needs to be lot more technical leaders as opposed to just managers. Given that we are fast loosing cost advantage to other emerging economies, we should go up the value-chain and remain indispensable to the world of VLSI. This is possible only with passionate engineers in India.

Vikas: Any suggestions for “Coffee with Vikas” blog?

Srini: I love this idea. Informally I have spoken about Vikas to few other seniors who have worked with you and all of believe you have the passion that’s largely lacking with young engineers. So we are happy to have you and we would all support your initiatives like this.

Keep them going!

Wish you and your readers a very happy new year 2017!

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Thanks Srini for your time and wish all Readers will get excited while Reading this.

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