At this week's Design Automation Conference (DAC), Si2 is also announcing a new release of the Effective Current Source Model (ECSM) standard, as well as a strategic partnership with the Spirit IP consortium. According to Si2, current plans call for the new statistical library format to be based on the new ECSM 2.1 standard.

Companies announcing their support of the OMC's statistical library standards effort are EDA heavyweights Cadence Design Systems and Magma Design Automation; statistical timing analysis startup Extreme DA; IP providers ARM and Virage Logic; and Altos Design Automation, which is rolling out a statistical library characterization capability this week at DAC.

Because there's no standard way to exchange information between a characterized library and a statistical timing analysis tool, a provider such as Altos must work individually with each statistical timing analysis vendor. Further, there's no agreement on what needs to be included within a library that's characterized for statistical timing. The OMC is thus working on both the content of statistical libraries and a standard format in which that content will be conveyed.

"Our customers have told us that having to support multiple library formats for SSTA [static statistical timing analysis] will be a time-consuming and costly undertaking that will introduce errors into the design process," said Kam Kittrell, general manager of Magma's design implementation business unit. "We are pleased to be working on a single-source statistical library format, because we believe it will make it easier for our customers to address the challenges of process variation at and below the 65 nm node."

"Handling process variability is very important for our Encounter customers as they move to the 65nm node and below, " said Jan Willis, senior vice president for industry alliances at Cadence. "We are pleased to participate in this broad industry alliance effort to create a unified format for statistical library data based on ECSM."

Mustafa Celik, Extreme DA CEO, said his company is contributing the expertise it has gained by working with IDMs in support of Extreme DA's statistical timer. "As statistical models become part of the entire design flow, I think it will be important to have a standard format," he said.

"This [statistical timing] segment of the EDA industry is needing alignment on library formats in order to take off, and for the users to believe it's safe to go into the water," said Steve Schulz, Si2 president. "We've got a great opportunity to pull this together before everything goes and diverges too far."

Schulz said that the OMC's statistical timing working group has already made "rapid progress" towards a standards specification, with plans to release it before the end of 2006. The declaration of support by six vendors is an important step, he said. "I'm very encouraged because by having this early commitment, we're going to get ahead of the curve this time," Schulz said.

Missing from the list of supporters, however, is Synopsys Inc., which is introducing statistical analysis capabilities at DAC — and which is pushing its own Composite Current Source (CCS) models as an alternative to ECSM. Kittrell noted that no final decision has been made as to whether the library format will in fact be built on top of ECSM.

Synopsys would be welcome to join the library standards effort, Schulz said. "This is an open process," he said. "Other submissions can be contributed to this group and other members can choose to join this group and have an equal voice in this process." While ECSM is currently the starting point for a statistical library format, OMC is still open to "other contributions," he said.

The new ECSM 2.1 specification, meanwhile, includes dynamic power analysis extensions. These extensions allow power and dynamic power grid analysis information to be passed from cell characterization to design tools. The new specification is currently available for downloading.

Finally, Spirit and Si2 are announcing that they will work together to coordinate technical roadmaps, so as to target the consistency of data shared among Si2's OpenAccess and OMC efforts with the IP-XACT design exchange format provided by Spirit. IP-XACT was recently submitted to the IEEE for standardization.

"There are things that could be done inside the OpenAccess data model to extend it to represent Spirit data," Schulz said. "That would make it easier for IP reuse, and add more value to OpenAccess." Conversely, he noted, "OMC has some infrastructure capabilities coming out from which we think Spirit could benefit. We're all using API interfaces, so there's some natural synergy here."

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