Assessment of the OpenAccess Standard: Insights on the new EDA Industry Standard from Hewlett-Packard, a Beta Partner and Contributing Developer

The rapidly increasing complexity and quality requirements of integrated circuit design can only be addressed effectively by a design system architecture that supports very efficient, high-quality sharing of IC design data. The OpenAccess Coalition is delivering an industry standard Application Programming Interface (API) and Information Model (IM) that provides access to a shared database as an essential infrastructure component for modern IC design systems. The OpenAccess Standard IM and API, along with its reference implementation will be released to the industry early in 2003. Hewlett-Packard has participated in OpenAccess from the outset and most recently as a Beta evaluation partner for this OA industry release. HP has discovered many insights about the OpenAccess standardization process as well as specifically about the IM/API Standard and its reference implementation, which will be summarized herein, and explained in more detail during the presentation at the ISQED Conference. 1. Motivation for an Open, Industry Standard API & EDA Platform