By Nanette Collins
Author’s note: I’m a long-time marketing consultant to Verific, having first met many of Verific’s great employees when we worked together at Exemplar Logic, now part of Mentor, a Siemens Business.
Few companies in the semiconductor or EDA space can boast about reaching their 20th anniversary. Fewer still can point to a loyal band of customers, some of whom bring the company’s products with them as they move between jobs, not once but multiple times.
Well then, few of them are Verific.
Verific just finished 2019 celebrating its 20th anniversary supplying the semiconductor industry with solid, all-but-de-facto-standard Parser Platforms. It boasts a band of loyal customers, a testament to its product quality, exceptional support and a culture that nurtures relationships
Join us as several of Verific’s fiercest customer fanbase fete Verific with anecdotes and loads of good wishes on reaching the 20-year mark. Part 1 of the five-part series features Scott Aron Bloom, now principal solutions architect at Mentor, a Siemens Business, as he recounts his long association with Verific.
- Part 1: Fierce Loyalty to Verific’s Value
- Part 2: Marrying Expertise to Avoid Redoing What’s Already Been Done
- Part 3: The Silent Partner
- Part 4: Good Partnership on All Levels
- Part 5: Going the Extra Mile
Fierce Loyalty to Verific’s Value
It’s not often that a company has a relationship with a customer that goes back further than its history. But then, few companies have Scott Aron Bloom, former chief technology officer at Blue Pearl, as its customer.
Scott first met Verific founder and CTO Rob Dekker in 1997 or so when Rob was a product director of the Exemplar line at Mentor Graphics, now part of Siemens. He hired Scott to manage an engineering group tasked with revamping the UI for Exemplar.
Rob exited Mentor soon after and formed Verific, leaving Scott with a keen impression of his capabilities. Scott stayed at Mentor for several more years and watched as Verific built its reputation as the de facto front-end supplier of Verilog, SystemVerilog and VHDL parsers.
When Scott became vice president of engineering at Stelar Tools, a company developing verification linting tools that visualized and analyzed RTL code. Stelar’s tools needed to read in VHDL and Verilog. According to Scott, “It was insane to do that ourselves. It would take four people two to three years or eight-to-12-man years. With Verific, we were able to jumpstart our development effort.”
Stelar was acquired by Lattice Semiconductor and it became a Verific customer. A year or so later, Scott joined Blue Pearl, a supplier of design analysis tools for functional verification, where he was CTO. Not surprisingly, Verific came with Scott.
Yes, it’s no exaggeration that Scott is a huge Verific fan. “The Verific support team gets fixes done quickly,” says Scott. “Having engineering in the Bay Area gives Verific a huge jump in the ability to offer good service and respond to customers.”
Another plus is the software’s flexibility. Verific will work with a customer to extend the code to meet its specific needs. That extension or addition is not shared with other customers nor will it ever be a product in the Verific’s portfolio. This sense of fair play is part of the culture.
“I met Rob, Michiel Ligthart and Abhijit Chakrabarty in 1997 and have been a Verific customer for 17 years. I’m fiercely loyal and value what Verific provides. I’m also cheap. I don’t want to reinvent a parser if I can use Verific instead.”
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To learn more about Verific’s Parser Platform, send email to info@verific.com or call (510) 522-1555.