After over a year of negotiations tha became intense about six months ago, Accellera and the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) announced that their members and Boards have approved their merger, and they have united to form Accellera Systems Initiative. The new name acquiesces both groups who strongly wanted to maintain some identity even after the merger. Accellera is by far the organization with the most IEEE standard and the wider interest in EDA. Thus the web presence of the newly formed consortium will remain "Accellera". The new organization leverages the complementary efforts of both organizations and is chartered to create comprehensive system-level and semiconductor design standards to benefit the electronic design community by facilitating efficient collaboration among its worldwide members.

After merging with the SPIRIT consortium over two years ago, Accellera has integrated the standardization needs of the IP industry with those of EDA in general. SystemC had been kept apart, in spite of very serious efforts by both Accellera working groups and IEEE standard making bodies, from a tightly integrated standard development in both verification and system level design and synthesis. The merger is the logical result of the highly successful work of both organizations on standards to improve the design and verification methods enabling the growth of the electronics industry. The union will increase efficiency and provide even greater benefits to the industry.

“Our new organization is chartered to address the growing and complex needs of the semiconductor and electronics industries by developing electronic design standards that allow them to create and manufacture products quickly in our rapidly changing market place,” said Shishpal Rawat, Accellera Systems Initiative chair. “With our newly combined organization, we can efficiently accelerate the development of system-level and IP standards across multiple design environments, to increase electronic design productivity and lower the cost of designing ICs and embedded systems.”

The new consortium has expanded the total number of Board members to twenty one and has sixteen directors at present. A total of thirty nine companies have joined the new Accellera System Initiative. They include EDA vendors and users, with representation from semiconductors foundries and IDMs, systems developers, FPGA vendors, as well as training and research organizations.

"The IEEE Standards Association notes that the EDA industry has benefited over the years from the technical work achieved by both organizations including the development of eight IEEE standards. We look forward to the continued work of Accellera Systems Initiative to develop EDA and IP standards that elevate designer productivity and set the foundation to build the next generation of electronic products,” said Judith Gorman, managing director, IEEE Standards Association.