Si2Si2 MemberMember ReportReport 20102010 InnovationInnovation ThroughThrough CollaborationCollaboration BoardBoard ofof DirectorsDirectors 20102010 -- 20112011 TermTerm Apache Design Systems ARM AMD Vic Kulkarni John Goodenough Jim Miller Sr VP/General Manager of VP, Design Vice President, RTL Business Unit Technology & Automation Design Engineering Cadence Design Systems IBM Intel Charlie Huang Dr Leon Stok Rahul Goyal Senior Vice President VP, EDA Director, EDA Business and Chief Strategy Officer National GLOBALFOUNDRIES LSI Semiconductor Mojy Chian Prabhakaran Krishnamurthy James Lin Senior VP, Design Senior Director, Design VP Technology Enablment Implementation Infrastructure Group Synopsys Si2 John Chilton Steve Schulz Sr. VP & General Manager President & CEO LetterLetter fromfrom thethe ChairmanChairman Prabhu Krishnamurthy - LSI Senior Director, Design Implementation Si2 Board of Directors Chair As we turn the leaf on another successful year of collaboration at Si2, it is time to reflect on our collective accomplishments for 2010. Si2 started off the year approving the formation of a new coalition, "OpenPDK", with the goal of improving efficiency and interoperability for the creation of process design kits (PDKs), which are used universally across our industry. We are extremely pleased with the excitement that this new coalition has created, and we now have 15 member companies who are actively contributing to support the broad technical scope of OpenPDK. This scope includes an open process specification with reference implementation and plug-ins; enhanced, standardized symbols and parameters; CDF parameter and callback standards; PDK targeting support added to the OpenDFM standard; standard Pcell parameters; OpenAccess technology file enhancements; and a standardized SPICE socket. 2010 was also a strong year of progress for Si2's other coalitions. The OpenAccess Coalition released support for 32nm constraints and introduced multi-threading to the reference implementation. The OAC also initiated a new Extension Steering Group to approve community-based additions to the OpenAccess schema, use models, or software that do not require changes to the base standard. The DFM Coalition released the much-anticipated OpenDFM 1.0 standard to industry, complete with a reference implementation parser, plug-in generators, and suite of test cases to verify compatibility. Not only does OpenDFM standardize leading-edge DFM parameter checks, but testing by members has found it to be as much as 20x more efficient than existing DRC formats. The Low-Power Coalition published a best-practices Interoperability Guide for design teams using both CPF and UPF-1801 formats, completed work on CPF 2.0, and released a requirements document for enhanced power modeling standards. The Open Modeling TAB delivered extensions to Liberty to enable more consistent charac- terization and validation of macro-cell libraries. This was also a milestone year for membership, with Si2 expanding its representation across the supply chain. As the representative of a large fabless corporation (LSI) to Si2's Board of Directors, I am very pleased that the Board now includes a leading foundry (GLOBALFOUNDRIES) among its elected members. The OpenAccess Coalition reached a new record high of 46 member companies in 2010, with the help of semiconductor market leaders such as Samsung, and Texas Instruments. Founding membership in the OpenPDK Coalition included all major EDA vendors. Because of an enduring value proposition to industry, Si2 has maintained financial stability even during difficult times in our global economy. Si2 managed finances well, maintaining it's strong 2009 fund balance and achiev- ing a 10% increase in revenues versus 2009. This provides a solid foundation to support the tremendous amount of coalition deliverables work that has been planned for 2011. Going into 2011, Si2's focus will be on delivering tangible return on investment value to our membership and to the industry at large, not only with newer efforts such as OpenPDK, OpenDFM, and Open3D, but also estab- lished efforts that also require ongoing innovations in OpenAccess, low power flows, and open modeling. I am proud to serve as Chairman of this fine organization, and I call for your continued support to work alongside industry leaders to improve design flow integration and interoperability for us all. Through increased member- ship and participation, we can remove more barriers to reduce costs and further open market opportunity. - PK - President’s Message Si2 Steve Schulz, President & CEO When do standards matter most to your business? Business goals vary: to enable or grow a market, increase share of a market, reduce internal costs, enable faster time-to-market, or steer an industry in a technology direction favorable to your products or methodologies. The key to understanding when a standard becomes an important link to your business is to recognize scenarios where the exchange of data is (a) impeding efficient operations, or (b) impedes a desired business strategy. In the case of impeding operations, this usually takes the form of wasted manual effort affecting cost and/or schedule, or limits technical features of the product. In the second scenario, a desired business strategy (for users) may be to provide flexibility in choice of suppliers to adapt to changing market conditions. For suppliers, it opens up market opportunity with users who embrace open standards and in- creases focus on more differentiating areas of your product. Next, assess the important attributes of a standard to support those objectives. These will be case-specific, however a standard should be extensible by design, tested with real-world use cases, enable leverage / consis- tency with other existing standards, and supported by reference code, training, and utilities to ease adoption. Standards with broad impact spanning across the design flow will yield a proportionally larger return on invest- ment (ROI) when adopted. When it comes to standards, the ROI business value actually increases as adoption grows, so a good investment in a standard now becomes an even better one as more of industry converges around it over time. Although it can be a valid business strategy to wait for a standard to become available for free, many strong market leaders repeatedly make the choice to engage early instead. There can be numerous reasons for this choice. First, if your company has internal methodologies or uses specific data that offers in-house advantages, it would be important to protect those advantages by ensuring the standard does not conflict with or minimize them. Second, if others developing the standard lack the expertise in your company's core strength areas, then your competition's needs would be met while yours may not. Furthermore, many executives tell us that working with other peer thought leaders makes for better and more creative engineers. The process behind developing a standard may not seem too important at first. However, those with experience will tell you that these details can matter a great deal and can directly affect the company's ROI. Look for strictly non-discriminatory processes at all levels, broad representative participation, equally shared rights, control, and ownership of the technology, and strong legal protection for your company's IP portfolio. Please make a conscious decision about participating in Si2 standards, since they may have a large impact on your business and future competitiveness. It is only through a balance of give-and-take in standards investment that our industry can continue to grow in capability and efficiency, and where the right standards at the right time can help us achieve critical mass in emerging "More Than Moore" technology areas (e.g., 3D die stacking). This essence is also well captured in Si2's tag line, "Innovation Through Collaboration". The members of Si2 believe in this model, and the business value of these investments, to help our industry move forward. Sincerely, Steven E. Schulz OpenAccessOpenAccess CoalitionCoalition The OpenAccess Coalition is a community-driven initiative formed to enable the creation of tightly inte- grated flows involving best-in-class commercial and proprietary tools and intellectual property, neces- sary to support design of today's complex chips. This is done through an open-standard application programming interface (API) and reference database implementation supporting that API. OpenAccess adoption has continued unabated in 2010, as proven by the number of companies who are either selling OpenAccess-based tools or are using OpenAccess- based flows in chip design. Coalition membership is at an all-time high of 46 mem- bers, up from 36 just one year ago. A broad membership and increased participation is important to continue to drive the evolution of OpenAccess to meet the needs of the entire industry. Plans for 2011 include: Production release of SWIG-based scripting language bindings, and OpenAccess functionality and performance enhancements in line with the published roadmap (pending priority assessment and approval by the Coalition). MajorMajor AccomplishmentsAccomplishments -- 20102010 • A major DM4 release with several enhancements - Initial support for Multi-threading, based on a first set of well-understood use cases, as well as support for 32nm constraints natively in OpenAccess • The Extensions Steering Group (ESG) was formed to encourage a new generation of functionality and input from multiple sources in the industry