Archive for March, 2009

Today, the IEEE-SA Standards Board approved the standard known as 1801: Standard for Design and Verification of Low Power Integrated Circuits. Everyone in the field of low-power chip design has known it as UPF, the Unified Power Format. Approval by the IEEE-SA is a significant milestone in the life of a standard, and everyone who dedicated time, brainpower, and expertise to 1801 deserves a hearty congratulations and a long weekend.

The 1801 standard describes the design intent for implementing, analyzing, and verifying today’s advanced, low-power chips. With the growing awareness of energy consumption as it impacts our environment, 1801 joins a family of IEEE standards that can be called “green”. Chips that consume less power are at the beginning of a food chain of less-hungry electronic products.

From supporting the formation of and participating in the Accellera technical subcommittee for UPF, to organizing workshops, to writing articles, to working with my competitors and customers, and finally as a member of the IEEE-SA Standards Board, I’ve been involved in 1801 from start to finish. Along with many of my respected colleagues, I experienced the excitement and struggles that occurred throughout the process of producing 1801. While my role was largely in the “business” aspects of developing this standard, I relished the opportunity to stay current with low-power chip design techniques. I even found myself enthusiastically giving a technical demo to a group of engineers at DAC. Wow, did that take me back in time!

Development of the Unified Power Format began in Accellera before I started this blog. I wrote several posts about it after it was transferred from Accellera, where it was first created, to the IEEE-SA under sponsorship by the IEEE DASC (Design Automation Standards Committee):

Join the P1801 working group

Is there any hope for a single standard?

UPF at the Interoperability Forum

UPF at EDSFair

UPF is a real standard with real adoption

Join the P1801 ballot group

Less visible than the U.S. Presidential ballot, but still important

What’s in store for P1801?

 You can google “Unified Power Format” for an extensive list of 1801-related materials.

The 1801 standards game was most impressive in how quickly 3 of the 4 leading EDA companies rose to occasion to work together, including their customers and all interested EDA companies, when the industry demanded an open standard for low-power IC design and verification.

 

Today, my company announced its “Lynx” complete design system. You can read the details and learn more from your local Synopsys office. What’s interesting and important to me, however, is that interoperability is as big of a feature in Lynx as all the rest. I’ll write more about Lynx in the coming weeks, and I invite you to think “standards”, “open”, and “interoperable” as you learn more about it.

Last week, I was in Beijing as a member of the IEEE Standards Association’s outreach delegation to China. Our mission was to develop stronger ties to Chinese organizations that work on standards related to those of the IEEE-SA. Unlike in the United States, all standardization activities in China are associated with the nation’s government. We met with three groups, held a half-day seminar about IEEE standards, visited Lenovo, and browsed China’s National Library of Standards. Plus, I ate some pretty unusual food, at least for most Americans.

The first organization we met with was the China Electronics Standardization Institute, CESI. What I learned in this meeting is that copyrights pose a challenge for China to adopt IEEE standards because of requirements from the Standards Administration of China, SAC. (Can’t read this site? Try this one: SAC.) An ad hoc committee can be formed in the IEEE-SA to tackle this. CESI and IEEE-SA have signed a memorandum of cooperation, and there was a nice ceremony in celebration.

The second organization we met with was the China National Institute of Standardization, CNIS. It has 6 research sub-institutes; the High and New Technologies and Information Standardization branch is the one that shares the most interest with the IEEE-SA. I was intrigued, however, by 2 of the other branches that are working on standards for food and consumer product safety and quality. They know that without these, there are barriers to international trade.

The third organization was the China Communications Standards Association, CCSA.Members of CCSA are corporate bodies only (companies, universities, research institutes, other organizations). The IEEE-SA has been an observer so far, but can join as a member by applying and being approved.

The joint IEEE-CESI seminar was well-attended, but the audience seemed a bit shy to ask questions (or maybe they knew everything already) until my presentation about how to participate in IEEE standards development. BTW, there are 2 active corporate projects underway in the IEEE that were driven by China: P1903 Standard for a Next Generation Service Overlay Network and P1888 Standard for Ubiquitous Green Community Control Network Protocol. Both of these were featured in the seminar.

Lenovo is the company that now owns the ThinkPad technology from IBM and manufactures the ThinkPad product line. We were treated to a tour of their showroom, and I saw a computer that Jack Bauer would crave. (I’ll tell you more if you ask.) They also designed the torch for the 2008 Olympics. Lenovo is interested in standards for the same reason all companies are: they help grow the market and make business more efficient.

Do you want to know what I ate? Chicken feet, jellyfish, pig stomach, sea cucumber, and thousand-year-old eggs. The eggs weren’t really a thousand years old, but they were black and kind of smelled like they were. I probably won’t eat any of these again, but my mom would be proud that I tried them before saying that I didn’t like them.

The Electronic Design Processes workshop is a unique event. Each year, for the past 15 years, visionaries and "celebrities" in the field of electronic design get together in an intimate setting. They present state-of-the-art methodologies and postulate the future.

This year, topics will include:

• Are Threads Dead?
• Challenges of RTL Handoff
• Will We Miss the Bus?
• Is the Analog Revolution Really Here? 

Registering early will get you a discount and so will your IEEE membership.

Hope to see you there!