Jun
EDA Standards
For the EDA industry, standards are traditionally defined by the EDA companies. While end users often attend the first few meetings of a new standards venture, few of them have the time or inclination to spend the many hours it takes to work through the technical details or the politics. As a result, many of the standards end up being a compromise solution based on what the EDA companies know how to implement. There has recently been a big exception to this and the possibility of another coming. The current exception is the Unified Coverage group within Accellera. After the EDA companies first refused to donate technology to satisfy the need, the user community took it up and continued to push forward with it. Now, a year later, the EDA companies realize that this was important to users and are willing to come back to the table. One for the user community.
At DAC, I had the pleasure to moderate a panel titled “OVM, VMM or roll your own”. This lively discussion centered around the needs of a verification methodology and the infrastructure to support it, with a view to making it extensible enough to last 5 or 10 years. One of the big issues that came up is the waste created by having two such competing infrastructures. I recommended at the end of the panel, that this is where users can and should make their voices heard. The users have the power and ability to decide on the fate of this industry struggle. Let your voices be heard and the EDA companies will listen eventually.
The end comment of your panel is one that I often hear as an EDA guy. One person will say, “Standards are a Good Thing.” Then everyone shouts “Hear! Hear!” and all eyes slowly turn to the EDA vendors sitting in the back of the room (the greedy lummoxes!)
However, I’ve found that the engineers’s love of a standard methodology quickly slips away when they are actually presented with one. This is because the proposed methodology is “too big” or “too small” or “too OOPy” or “not OOPy enough” or “too confusing” or “too simplistic” or “too open” or “too closed” or “too new” or “too old” and always “Not Invented Here.”
I applaud your comment that the user community should let their voices be heard. I wonder, though, if they will all say something that can result in a standard.
June 24th, 2008 at 11:53 am