by Mike Maisen

Las Vegas, NV - June 18th, 2001 - On the same day the Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2), the Open Access Community (OAC), and Cadence Design Systems announced a community-source agreement that will take Cadence's Genesys database and its application programming interface (API) and make it a standard, a DAC lunch panel of OAC members and tool vendors, despite some rumblings of dissent, projected a mostly positive outlook on the future adoption of a common design infrastructure.

John Darringer, manager of system-design at IBM, noted the implications of the community-source agreement and said that "the success [of the OAC agreement] will all hinge on adoption." Greg Spirakis, vp of the architecture group and director of design technology at Intel, said that the OAC is a response to a fundamental shift away from the file transfer systems. "[This shift] is happening regardless of what the EDA community has been or is willing to do. [An effort like] Si2 is already going on in many large semiconductor companies," Spirakis said. He added, "Open access is a step towards cooperation."

Terry Blanchard of HP described his mission, beginning in 1996, to speak with other large semiconductor companies to see what kind of internal infrastructure they were using. "Out of the 15 companies I looked at, all of them had a different proprietary system. Imagine the difficulty of design in the future if we keep going like this." Blanchard said the requirements for an open-industry standard API include an "extremely" open control model, wide adoption, a referenced database and data model implementation, extensibility, and support from multiple OS and HW platforms. "I said a year ago that this [standardization] needs to be running in 18 months or it might be too late [to avoid increased fragmentation of the design flow]."

The panel included representatives from IBM, HP, Intel, Cadence, Simplex, and Magma; all except for Magma are members of the OAC. Over the last 18 months, the OAC-a group formed out of Si2-had been looking at technology that could be commercially adopted and used as design infrastructure for current and future IC designs. Cadence, one of two "major EDA vendors" that offered their technology according to Don Cottrell, vp at Si2, was eventually selected to be the technology source.

Is all of EDA Committed to OAC?
Panel moderator Richard Goering, managing editor of EDA at EE Times, suggested that the lack of Avanti, Mentor Graphics (Mentor was originally scheduled to be on the lunch panel but pulled out the night before according to Goering), and Synopsys-three off the four major EDA companies-attendance on the panel, pointed to a major controversy brewing. "If the vendor infighting doesn't stop, this could be a dangerous [to the EDA industry]," Goering said.

Lavi Lev, senior vice president and GM of IC Solutions at Cadence, said the first problem of an IC designer is to combine IC design tools. "It's pretty obvious that this is a solutions game, not a point tool game, "Lev said. "We encourage our industry colleagues to join in, "he added.

Later, Lavi responded to accusations made by a Mentor Graphics representative at the Interoperability Workshop the previous day of reneging on a promise to deliver the Genesys source code to the OAC by July 2001, said that Cadence never agreed to offer its source code to the OAC by July 2001. "I think what happened is somebody extrapolated the July 2001 time as the date in initial conversations, but this was never Cadence's intention, "Lavi said. Though he wouldn't commit to a specific date, citing an unwillingness to release less than elegant code to the public until it's ready, Lavi said that people can "start integrating [the API] today with agreements from Cadence and OAC" and that the code would be released to the public by "the end of the year."

In commenting on the API issue, Aki Fujimura, president and COO of Simplex, noted his standardization experience as the founder of Tangent that produced the first LEF/DEF standards as well as his time at Cadence where he worked on the admittedly failed CAD Frameworks Initiative (CFI) project. "Realistically, this API standard is a business, political, and technology issue. [To make it work] we have to make it a business issue for every single player. "We can't fight like [LA Lakers stars whose team has won consecutive NBA championships] Shaq and Kobe in the early years."

Joe Hutt of Magma was skeptical of the API effort's chances and said that the companies on the panel, while paying lip service to the spirit of the OAC, won't really commit to anything until the standard is proven. "I also believe that the source code [for the API specification] has to be totally removed from the company that supplied it, "Hutt said.

Blanchard disagreed with part of Hutt's observation, noting that "[HP] has actively modified our internal API as a result of conversations with companies on this panel."

In answering the question of whether having the source code immediately is necessary for the OAC to prosper, Fujimura described two user communities; the big semiconductor companies who have their own internal CAD tools and who its appropriate for to want the source code; and the other mid-level companies, like Simplex, where "it's probably good enough to have API-level migration," Fujimura said. Fujimura did add, however, that "the idea of a having a reference implementation has no meaning if the source code and reference database are kept separate."

Put up or shut up
Despite the general consensus that the Cadence database, even initially without the source code, is at least a good first step for the OAC and vendor and user community in general, Hutt remained unmoved. "The issue of open source becomes much more difficult to swallow, if it's not taken away from Cadence or else Cadence will dictate the future of EDA." Darringer responded to this, clarifying for the panel and audience the notion that Cadence owns the API. "[Though Cadence is a member] the OAC owns the API, not Cadence."

Spirakis noted "User companies already have databases, and APIs-[tool] vendors need to be able to sell to us in this environment. If any vendor company has something [else] to put forward, please do so."