DVClub RTP - November 5, 2026, Tom Fitzpatrick Presenting

There is no cost; this event includes lunch, a great presentation, networking opportunities, and a RAFFLE for Portable Monitors and Noise-Canceling Ear Buds!!! Please register and share with your colleagues!

• 11:30am — Doors Open / Networking
• 12:00pm — Lunch / Presentation Tom Fitzpatrick
• 1:00pm — Raffle and Networking

Presentation - Tom Fitzpatrick

"Using AI to Make Verification Engineers Better (Don’t Panic — Practical Ways to Work Smarter with AI)"

We’re at a turning point in functional verification, and it’s natural to feel a little anxious about what AI means for our work. In this session, we’ll explore how AI can help us become more effective by accelerating debug, test generation, coverage analysis, and regression triage while preserving the engineering judgment that makes verification credible and engineers valuable. We’ll look at where AI is already delivering real value, where it still falls short, and how the right workflows and guardrails can help us work smarter without compromising quality or accountability. The goal is to give us a practical, grounded way to use AI as the tool that it is rather than worrying whether it will replace the skills we’ve spent years building.

Tom Fitzpatrick Tom Fitzpatrick, CEO of Big Fish EDA Consulting, has spent much of his 40-year career developing, deploying and standardizing functional verification technologies and methodologies that have literally reshaped the Functional Verification industry. As a key developer and standards committee lead for SystemVerilog, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), and Portable Stimulus (PSS), Tom is responsible for technology that is used in nearly 70% of electronics development being done in recent years. Now an independent consultant, Tom works with several EDA startups to help them apply AI to the functional verification process and help them develop new tools and approaches to make both AI and the human-in-the-loop more effective for functional verification.

Tom currently serves as Past-Chair of DVConUS, concluding many years on the Steering Committee, including serving as General Chair and Technical Program Chair. He has also served on the DAC Executive Committee as Special Programs Chair. He is the chair of the IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog Working Group and has served as a charter member, chair or vice-chair of IEEE 1800.2 UVM and Accellera SystemVerilog, UVM, Portable Stimulus, UVM-Mixed Signal, and SystemVerilog Mixed-Signal Interface Working Groups. He is the recipient of both the Accellera Technical Excellence and IEEE Ron Waxman Meritorious Service Awards. His UVM training videos on Verification Academy have helped train thousands of verification engineers, and he has just released a 16-part video training series on "Learning the Portable Stimulus Standard" for Accellera. He has published numerous conference papers, articles, and blog posts on functional verification.

Tom earned his Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been happily married to his wife, Dee, for over 30 years and has two grown children who are also engineers. He is an avid golfer and a die-hard fan of the Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots and the Boston Celtics.

Register now and please share with your colleagues!