DVCon 2010 is coming soon –  it starts on Monday, February 22, at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose CA. DVCon, the Design and Verification Conference, continues to bring valuable information to chip design engineers about modern techniques and industry standards which help them in their day-to-day efforts.

What’s new with DVCon this year? To begin with, it’s one day longer. There were enough high-quality tutorials proposed that the steering committee decided to extend the conference to accommodate them.

The panel that was previously known as the “big-wigs” or “troublemaker’s” panel will take a new approach and focus on real world problems being faced today. Called “What Keeps You Up At Night?”, it will give chief technologists the opportunity to talk about their challenges with contemporary chip design. (You’ll notice there are no EDA companies represented in the lineup of panelists.) The moderator will be JL Gray, a fellow blogger and the author of Cool Verification.

For the first time, the DVCon 2010 Steering Committee included a Social Media Chair (yours truly). In addition to writing blog posts about the conference like several of us did at DVCon 2009, you can expect tweets, photos, videos, and articles. You’ll see the “Twitter Tower by Synopsys” at the conference where attendees can watch the live stream of tweets. If you can’t attend DVCon, fire up your TweetDeck for a personal-sized Twitter Tower.

My colleague, Rick Jamison, and I will host a session on Monday evening at 6pm that everyone is welcome to participate in. Our “Social Media 101 for Engineers” will be an informative (I hope) discussion about social media basics and how today’s new media can help you get your work done better and manage the ever-increasing amount of information that’s out there on Web 2.0. We don’t want to just do a presentation, we want to talk with you, so join us if you can.

As a reminder, everyone posting anything about DVCon is encouraged to use the tag, dvcon, for all blogs, pictures, videos, and articles; use the hashtag #dvcon for tweets. Searching for these tags can put interesting facts, news, and stories at anyone’s fingertips.

On Tuesday, Accellera – the sponsor of DVCon – will have a birthday party. At a lunchtime event, Accellera’s 10th year will be celebrated. I mean all their 10 years, not just the 10th.

Finally, NASCUG (the North America SystemC Users’ Group) will be co-located with DVCon. It’s a good opportunity for system-level designers to capitalize on two events in the same week.

See you at DVCon!