Accellera & OSCI Unite

System Standards Worlds Initiate Unification

Accellera, who brought us SystemVerilog, and the Open SystemC Imitative (OSCI), who brought us SystemC have made known their intent to unite to form a single front-end electronic design automation (EDA) standards organization.  You can read their joint press release here.

While this may come as a surprise to many, one thing has remained constant for many years: the two organizations have had a long standing policy of collaborative interactions as both have evolved their standards programs.  At a DATE 2004 panel titled “SystemC and SystemVerilog: Where do they fit?  Where are they going?,” technical members of the two communities gathered to ponder answers to those questions.  At DAC 2004, when I was chair of Accellera and Guido Arnout was chair of OSCI, we stood before a large assembly of SystemC users a few months later to point to what was not so obvious to many, SystemVerilog and SystemC complement each other.

Guido and I dispelled any issues of a “language war” and focused on what the value each language and what it delivered to the design and verification community.  A lot has transpired since then.  Both SystemC and SystemVerilog are now IEEE standards, know as IEEE Std. 1666™ and IEEE Std. 1800™ respectively.  And both OSCI and Accellera have continued to evolve their standards work program in significant and meaningful ways.

In this evolution, it became clear to me that each organization was “completing” the other.  OSCI has developed the popular Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) standards and Accellera had adopted TLM in their Universal Verification Methodology (UVM™).  As the technical teams from each organization have leveraged each other, it began to make more sense to initiate discussions to unite the two groups to address further front-end EDA standards challenges – as one. And, indeed, the two organization recognized this and have taken the steps to determine how best to combine operations into a single organization.

In the months ahead, the unified organization will emerge, but for now, it is business as usual for the standards development teams in OSCI and Accellera.

What do you think about the unification?