A notable addition to this year's workshop was Synopsys Inc., which talked about the company's Open Milkyway database. Along with speakers from OpenAccess, the Synopsys reps detailed current efforts to link the OpenAccess and Open Milkyway application programming interfaces-and perhaps to offer a single industry API for design data in the future.

The user-backed OpenAccess Coalition, operating under the Silicon Integration Initiative, offers an open API and a reference database implementation based on Cadence Design Systems Inc. technology. "We are not talking about files," said John Darringer, manager for system design at IBM Research. "We're talking about the need to share applications in memory."

Several user panelists gave strong endorsements of OpenAccess, but not without some requests. Marco Casale-Rossi, central R&D manager at STMicroelectronics, said an open database is necessary so that ST can integrate tools from EDA vendors, startups and universities. Casale said that more EDA vendors must endorse OpenAccess, and he expressed concern that small startups, lacking the resources to support both OpenAccess and Milkyway, may have to choose between them.

Hewlett-Packard Co. is adopting the OpenAccess API and reference database in an "evolutionary" fashion in order to integrate third-party and internal tools, said Rick Ferreri, a CAD system architect at HP. He also voiced support for the Golden Gate Working Group, which seeks to bridge the OpenAccess and Milkyway APIs.

IBM has already integrated its tools into its proprietary Integrated Data Model, but now it's linking that model to OpenAccess so as to better support third-party tools, said Dale Hoffman, director of EDA alliances for the company. Down the road, he said, IBM may rewrite some of its applications to run natively on OpenAccess.

But Jon Fields, vice president of design platforms for Agere Systems, was openly skeptical of OpenAccess. "We can get adequate integration from existing standards," he said. "If stuff is tightly integrated into some binary interface and it doesn't work in aggregate, who's responsible?" Fields said the small EDA vendors he works with have not indicated a need for OpenAccess.

Marking milestones

Scott Peterson, the OpenAccess Coalition chairman, said milestones in the past year included the release of the OpenAccess 2.0 and 2.1 databases and the creation of the Golden Gate Working Group. The coalition released a three-year road map last week (see June 2, page 37).

Joe Santos, OpenAccess development manager at Cadence, said important features in OpenAccess 2.1 include simultaneous support for logical and physical hierarchy, thread-safe access to design data and an ability to load only those layers needed for a given task. Version 2.2 at year's end will support timing constraints, a universal data model (UDM) for manufacturing and a library database.

Rich Goldman, vice president of strategic market development at Synopsys, said the company joined the Golden Gate Working Group "so we can make sure we align the APIs over time." He described the Milkyway licensing program and some real-world integrations.

Golden Gate Working Group chairman Jim Wilmore said the first step for the group is to find a useful subset of objects common to both information models. Next is to provide mapping between the models and to write pseudocode to smooth "misalignments." Those tasks will be finished in July, and then the group will seek to locate alpha and beta customers.

Standardize "some level of API" but don't go too far, warned Raul Camposano, Synopsys' chief technical officer. If it's too granular, he said, mapping will be difficult. And creating a single data model will "take innovation away from the industry."

Manufacturing emerged as a strong theme in discussions of future directions for OpenAccess. There is no unified manufacturing database now, noted Aki Fujimura, vice president of R&D at Cadence. The OpenAccess UDM, he said, can provide that database-and tighten links between chip design and manufacturing.

"Mask shops are dying," said Tom Grebinski, chairman of the data path task force for Semiconductor Equipment & Materials International, making a compelling case for a database standard. "They're taking forever to make masks, and then they have to charge LSI Logic $1 million."

The GDSII layout format provides only geometric information, forcing mask shops to guess at the design data they need, Grebinski said. He thus called for a single, open database. And "we need to have a very clear-not a milky-view of where we're going in the future," Grebinski added, in a gossamer-veiled suggestion of his preference for OpenAccess over Milkyway.

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