Hello,

Leon Stok (chair) and I (vice chair) are both certainly available to shed more light into the newly formed DTC.
Please allow me to add more clarification to the listed speculations. Also Dennis, how has been cited, did not really dig into it too much either.

As Richard mentioned in his post, the DTC has been formerly under Si2. Several reasons led us to consider a move under IEEE.

Certainly several standardization bodies do exist today and as Brian says, they are plagued by politics. But then, as individual companies we are already participating in these bodies already today. So what we can we do to change this situation to the positive?

This is one reason that we continue to feel strongly about an EDA user only committee with the long-term goal to become a stronger representative body open for all EDA user companies. In this it certainly excludes EDA vendors but does apply to foundries and design services companies.

Jointly we will establish EDA industry requirements for the future needs of the semiconductor and system design communities. This may be in the form of direct communication with EDA vendors or as standardization proposals to one of the existing bodies.
Since all DTC member companies are likewise active in these standardization working groups, we continue to push these proposals in the respective working groups as well.

While we are being hosted by IEEE CEDA our function is not exclusively focused on it. The IEEE is a well established and well respected global engineering institution, which certainly also addresses standardization and coordinates major engineering events (also EDA related). Therefore it provides us with neutral ground to provide inputs also to other standardization organizations and to attract new members.

Finally the scope of only EDA users gives us an opportunity to discuss and share relevant topics/ best practices. Clearly this is and will be in strict compliance to anti-trust and other applicable constraints and regulations.
Still plenty of topics of common interest remains.

Responses on the press release have been good and additional interested parties have stepped forward.

Be ensured that you will continue to hear from us as we are making progress.

If you have any additional questions, please contact Leon Stok or myself.

Thank you and best regards,
Thomas Harms

Hi Brian: Good question, and I am also skeptical about this group, and in the dark as to how it is intended to work and what outcomes will be achieved. Yet, there is room for hope.

The majority of these players have already had their finger in the pie, but more as back room, strong players conducting shadow warfare, and they let the EDA companies conduct most of the ground efforts and take the blame for all the muck.

Typically design companies ask for a full MxN matrix of standard interoperability and they are unwilling to consider the long term impacts of ongoing overlapping standard lifetimes. Its easy for them to spend EDA's money, and not their own, yet the mounting pile of E/VMM/OVM/SVA/PSL combinations is costing the entire industry in lost productivity. They demand long support timelines, automatic migration features, and fast migration to new revisions. A good example of this is UPFv1.0->UPF2.0.

I am hopeful that this will make the design companies role more explicit and get them to the table so that they have an opportunity to converge and simplify their requirements.

In terms of exchange of information, the history is very positive as we have seen strong donations of technology like Intel's ForSpec, and great contributions on know-how from technology experts at Intel and Freescale. With this type of participation by the leaders of the system/design houses will have more skin in the game to contribute to the heavy lifting of standards creation.

The outcome on this will come down to the leadership of this group and whether there is discipline on controlling # of standards, reducing standards overlap, and ensuring standards are designed to be implementable and the semantics are defined such that the tools have interoperability.

Brian – it appears to me that the Design Technology Commitee (DTC) will be kind of an advisory board to IEEE CEDA, whose leadership heavily represents the academic and research communities. No harm in getting some input from people who have to get chips out the door. I had a recent blog about CEDA (http://tiny.cc/iRpjc) that mentioned some of its activities and the election of Cadence’s Andreas Kuehlmann as president.

Interestingly, Si2 also has a “DTC” (Design Technology Council, in this case) with a few of the same people as the IEEE CEDA DTC. How many DTCs does one industry need?