As you rightly observed in Verilog-VHDL battles, the EDA vendors chose to implement both HDLs and the users chose the one they were most comfortable with. Another aspect you skipped over is the impact of IP (on EDA stds) in its infancy days of the 90s. Many soft IPs (RTL) were available in one HDL or the other, but not both. That partially helped the users with their choice of HDL.

Similar to merger of OVI and VI into Accellera, I expect further consolidation of various “niche” standards bodies. Accellera itself has done well in furthering the standards message and positive impact on the user community by facilitating (expanding? see below) areas beyond (digital) HDL – AMS, verification, test, power, coverage, etc. Accellera also aligned itself closely with the world-recognized standards body of IEEE. However, there are several organizations that are addressing focused areas such as System C by OSCI, and IP delivery and integration by SPIRIT (Gary Delp, help!). I should also mention VSIA which recently disappeared and most of its active efforts moving under IEEE.

IEEE DASC is doing a fabulous job (Thanks Victor Berman!) of coordinating path for many EDA standards to come wetted through outside environments (Accellera, SPIRIT, etc.). It appears to be an excellent symbiotic relationship where focused organizations provide efficiency and IEEE provides thorough, comprehensive process and world-wide reach for these standards. I can envision smaller organizations consolidating into a unified channel to feed “community driven” standards efforts into IEEE.

As you can imagine, any organization that does not make itself useful will disappear! I am sure you know some candidates…

The Age of Expansion?

Here is another way to look at it … along with “fast, open, inclusive”, many of us have also preached “cooperate on standards/formats, compete on implementation/tools.” Your sighting of Verilog, VHDL, UPF, etc. are all good examples of that. More of these “formats” need to come out from being proprietary into open/public. Areas at both ends of the design spectrum are candidates – ESL and DFM. More in Analog, IPs and library areas. Today there are several “in-house” formats for DRC, OPC, CMP, RET, … that true interoperability is not achieved for a company or a design project from concept to production line at Fab and back into testing lab. We need to expand the notion beyond an individual user to the entire design team to the hardware team to the system team and to the overall product team. The scope is much bigger for standardization as the globalization continues to drive different ways we do product development (both internally and external to the local design teams).

Perhaps the Age of Re-birth? Second Avatar?

May be in next installment I will explain this ….

I can’t sleep at night.
This Idea has been bouncing around in my head for the past few months. I can’t shake it. If you know me, then you’ve probably heard me talk about the Idea or ask your opinion about the Idea or whether I’m…