Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera) is a

standards organization A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpr ...

that supports a mix of user and vendor standards and open interfaces development in the area of

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...

(EDA) and

integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

(IC) design and manufacturing. It is less constrained than the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

(IEEE) and is therefore the starting place for many standards. Once mature and adopted by the broader community, the standards are usually transferred to the IEEE.

History

In 2000, Accellera was founded from the merger of Open Verilog International (OVI) and VHDL International, the developers of

Verilog Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits, with the highest level of abstraction being at the re ...

and

VHDL VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Program, VHSIC Hardware Description Language) is a hardware description language that can model the behavior and structure of Digital electronics, digital systems at multiple levels of abstraction, ran ...

respectively. Both were originally formed nine years earlier in 1991. In June 2009, a merger was announced between Accellera and The SPIRIT Consortium, another major EDA standards organization focused on IP deployment and reuse. The SPIRIT Consortium obtained SystemRDL from the SystemRDL Alliance and then developed IP-XACT. The merger was completed in April 2010. SPIRIT stood for "Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-using IP within Tool-flows". In December 2011, Accellera and the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) approved their merger, adopting the name Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera) while continuing to develop

SystemC SystemC is a set of C++ classes and macros which provide an event-driven simulation interface (see also discrete event simulation). These facilities enable a designer to ''simulate'' concurrent processes, each described using plain C++ synta ...

. In October 2013, Accellera acquired the Open Core Protocol (OCP) standard, the intellectual property of the OCP International Partnership (OCP-IP).

The SPIRIT Consortium

The SPIRIT Consortium was a group of vendors and users of

(EDA) tools, defining standards for the exchange of

System-on-a-chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with memory, input/output, and dat ...

(SoC) design information. The standards defined included IP-XACT, an XML schema for vendor-neutral descriptions of design components, and SystemRDL, a language for describing registers in components. SPIRIT stood for "Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-using IP within Tool-flows". In June 2009 it was announced that SPIRIT would merge with Accellera.

SPIRIT membership

There were four levels of membership in the SPIRIT consortium. The ''Board of Directors'' (BoD) was the ruling body. Members around the time of the merge were: *

ARM Holdings Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing ...

Cadence Design Systems Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (stylized as cādence)Investor's Business DailCEO Lip-Bu Tan Molds Troubled Cadence Into Long-Term LeaderRetrieved November 12, 2020 is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology and computational ...

Freescale Semiconductor Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American semiconductor manufacturer. It was created by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. Freescale focused their integrated circuit products on the automotive, embedde ...

LSI Corporation LSI Logic Corporation was an American company founded in Santa Clara, California, was a pioneer in the ASIC and EDA industries. It evolved over time to design and sell semiconductors and software that accelerated storage and networking in dat ...

Mentor Graphics Mentor Graphics Corporation was a US-based electronic design automation (EDA) multinational corporation for electrical engineering and electronics, headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon. Founded in 1981, the company distributed products that ass ...

NXP Semiconductors NXP Semiconductors N.V. is a Dutch semiconductor manufacturing and design company with headquarters in Eindhoven, Netherlands. It is the third largest European semiconductor company by market capitalization as of 2024. The company employs approx ...

STMicroelectronics STMicroelectronics Naamloze vennootschap, NV (commonly referred to as ST or STMicro) is a European multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the largest of such companies in Europe. ...

Synopsys Synopsys, Inc. is an American electronic design automation (EDA) company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that focuses on silicon design and verification, silicon intellectual property and software security and quality. Synopsys sup ...

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog ...

''Contributing members'' performed the standardization work and donate time and effort to the production of new specifications. ''Reviewing member'' status was a free membership for companies. These get early access to specifications to facilitate a deep review round of each proposal before it goes public. ''Associate member'' status was similar to a reviewing membership but for academics and other not-for-profit organizations.Reviewing Members
/ref>

Open Core Protocol International Partnership Association

The ''Open Core Protocol International Partnership Association, Inc.'' (OCP-IP) was an independent, non-profit semiconductor industry consortium formed to administer the support, promotion and enhancement of the Open Core Protocol (OCP). OCP was the first fully supported, openly licensed, comprehensive, interface socket for semiconductor intellectual property (IP) cores. The mission of OCP-IP was to address problems relating to design, verification, and testing which are common to IP core reuse in "

plug and play In computing, a plug and play (PnP) device or computer bus is one with a specification that facilitates the recognition of a hardware component in a system without the need for physical device configuration or user intervention in resolving reso ...

system on a chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or Electronics, electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with computer memory, ...

(SoC) products. This initiative comprehensively fulfills system-level integration requirements by promoting IP core reusability and reducing design time, risk and manufacturing costs for SoC designs. Design teams developing consumer,

data processing Data processing is the collection and manipulation of digital data to produce meaningful information. Data processing is a form of ''information processing'', which is the modification (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an o ...

, telecom (wireless or wired), datacom and mass storage applications can gain significant benefits from the OCP-IP solution.

Accellera membership

Corporate members have a right to be eligible for election to the Board of Directors. Associate member companies have voting rights in all of Accellera's Technical Working Groups.Members
/ref>

Standards

The following EDA standards developed by Accellera were ratified by IEEE by 2019: *

or IEEE 1364 or IEC 61691-4 *

or IEEE 1076 or IEC 61691-1-1 *

Property Specification Language Property Specification Language (PSL) is a temporal logic extending linear temporal logic with a range of operators for both ease of expression and enhancement of expressive power. PSL makes an extensive use of regular expressions and syntactic suga ...

(PSL) or IEEE 1850 or IEC 62531 *

or IEEE 1666 *SystemC Analog/Mixed-Signal extensions or IEEE 1666.1 *

SystemVerilog SystemVerilog, standardized as IEEE 1800 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is a hardware description and hardware verification language commonly used to model, design, simulate, test and implement electronic sy ...

or IEEE 1800 * Standard Delay Format (SDF) or IEEE 1497 or IEC 61523-3 *Delay and Power Calculation System ( DPCS/OLA; see Standard Parasitic Exchange Format) or IEEE 1481 * Advanced Library Format (ALF) or IEEE 1603 or IEC 62265 * Open Compression Interface (OCI) or IEEE 1450.6.1 * Unified Power Format (UPF) or IEEE 1801 * Open Model Interface (OMI) or IEEE 1499 * IP-XACT or IEEE 1685 * Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) or IEEE 1800.2 The following EDA initiatives were developed by Accellera: * Open Core Protocol (OCP) * Open Verification Language (OVL) * Open Verification Library (OVL) *Portable Test & Stimulus Standard (PSS) * Standard Co-Emulation-Modeling Interface (SCE-MI) * Soft IP Tagging * SystemRDL (System Register Description Language) * Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS) * Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) * Verilog-AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal)

References

External links

* {{authority control Electronic design automation organizations Standards organizations in the United States