It is my great honor and pleasure to serve as the DVCon U.S. Conference General Chair. On behalf of the steering committee, a warm welcome to DVCon U.S. 2026! This year will be the first time we are at the new venue, the Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara, California, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. I am incredibly pleased to say that this has allowed us to expand the capacity for all the technical session rooms, as well as provide attendees with a much larger exhibition hall.

We are immensely proud to continue our tradition of providing an annual technical forum that serves the practicing design verification community. Now in its 38th year, DVCon U.S. has long established itself as the must-attend premier Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition.

We have an exciting program in store for attendees this year with a fully packed schedule over four days. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that many of the topics will be centered around AI!

We have two extremely exciting Industry keynotes on the schedule. The first keynote on Tuesday afternoon “Verification, Validation and HW/SW Challenges with Complex Chiplet-based Systems” will feature Abhi Kolpekwar, Senior Vice President Digital Verification Technology from Siemens EDA, Jean-Marie Brunet, Senior Vice President Hardware Assisted Verification from Siemens EDA, and a special guest speaker Alon Shtepel, Senior Director ASIC Verification and Emulation from Micron Technology. The second keynote is the Invited Industry Keynote on Wednesday afternoon “From Pixels to Tokens: Chip Design and Verification in the Era of AI” that will be presented by Stuart Oberman, Vice President from Nvidia. Both keynote presentations will offer insights into the vision and direction of design and verification for the future, especially with the disruption to workflows at all levels by AI.

Our panel chair, Ambar Sarkar, has organized a thought-provoking panel session, “Is AI the Key to Ending the Verification Bottleneck?” This will be an opportunity for attendees to participate and interact with panelists by asking questions during a live discussion.

Monday and Thursday will continue to be designated to tutorials and workshops, and I am pleased to share that this year’s program features more tutorials and workshops than in previous years. Shekar Chetput, the Tutorial and Workshop Chair has arranged an excellent program for us. The Accellera tutorials and workshops offer the latest in standards development in Clock Domain Crossing, Portable Stimulus, IP-XACT, and SystemVerilog Mixed-signal interfaces, and applications. In addition, many of the other tutorials and workshops are on the topic of agentic AI across RTL design, verification, and debug. I hope you take advantage of these opportunities to take a deeper look at what the industry has to offer and how these products and technologies can be used in methodologies shaping the next generation of electronic system design.

We appreciate all of the submissions to the conference, as we had a record number of submissions this year. Please keep contributing so the whole community can benefit from everyone sharing and learning. Dave Rich, the Technical Program Chair, along with a group of volunteer technical program committee members, have extensively reviewed and selected the best submissions, putting together outstanding technical sessions for attendees. Since AI is pervasive in all the design and verification flows, we have made some changes to the technical session format this year. Instead of having a separate AI track, we have interweaved AI related talks into the respective technologies that can be applied in design and verification projects.

To continue with our new tradition at DVCon U.S., there will be a Poster Ninja Warrior session on Wednesday, which will include the highest rated four posters (voted on by attendees) battling it out for top honors. Each Poster Warrior will be given five minutes to present their poster, followed by an insightful Q&A from a panel of expert judges. Audience participation and reaction are highly encouraged as it is an integral part of the judging process, creating a dynamic and interactive event.

We look forward to your votes for the best paper and best poster awards at the reception after the last program session on Wednesday.

We hope all the attendees will fully enjoy the keynotes, outstanding technical sessions, networking experience, and the opportunity to preview the latest industry design and verification tools in a variety of exhibitions.

To put together a conference of this magnitude requires tremendous effort. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Steering Committee and the Technical Program Committee, with the support of Conference Catalysts, for their tireless efforts to put together an excellent program for attendees. I would also like to thank all the sponsoring organizations for their generous financial support. Lastly, I want to thank all conference participants for their contributions in helping to build the foundation of this conference.

I look forward to seeing you at DVCon U.S. 2026!

DVCon U.S. 2026 General Chair