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HonghuangHonghuang Lin, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, received a third-place Best Paper Award at the premier conference for the functional design and verification of electronic systems.

Lin, who is in the computer engineering and systems group under the advisement of Dr. Peng Li, received the award at The Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition U.S. (DVCon U.S.) for his paper, "Functional Coverage Collection for Analog Circuits – Enabling Seamless Collaboration Between Design and Verification," which is co-authored with engineers from Texas Instruments Inc. The award is voted on by all the participants of the conference.

Lin's paper addresses the challenges in analog verification coverage, which is an increasingly important topic in the industry, by the proposed Analog Coverage Checking (ACC) framework. It's the first work to apply functional coverage metrics on analog circuits in a mixed signal simulation environment, which utilizes analog functional checkers deep inside the schematic hierarchy. In addition, it provides a mechanism for seamless collaborations between analog designers and verification engineers, by unifying the definitions of analog functional descriptions in the chip level for analog and mixed signal designs, and the construction of meaningful analog covergroup verification at the top level. It’s also an efficient way to track the verification progress. The proposed ACC framework serves as an efficient tool to embed analog checking in the early design stage and to conveniently track the verification progress.

Lin received his bachelor’s degree in automation from Tsinghua University, China in 2011. His research interests include analog and mixed-signal circuit verification, machine learning based circuit analysis and circuit modeling.

DVCon is the premier conference for discussion of the functional design and verification of electronic systems. DVCon is sponsored by Accellera Systems Initiative, an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating design and verification standards required by systems, semiconductor, intellectual property (IP) and electronic design automation (EDA) companies. In response to global interest, in addition to DVCon U.S., Accellera also sponsors DVCon Europe and DVCon India. For more information about Accellera, please visit www.accellera.org. For more information about DVCon U.S., please visit www.dvcon.org.