The IEEE, Accellera and The SPIRIT Consortium, announced today that the IEEE has approved a record number of Accellera and The SPIRIT Consortium Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and Intellectual Property (IP) standards in 2009. Accellera will celebrate its tenth year anniversary at a luncheon on Tuesday February 23, at DVCon.

The recently approved IEEE standards are:

• Accellera's SystemVerilog standard, ratified in November as IEEE 1800 2009, the SystemVerilog-Unified Hardware Design, Specification, and Verification Language Standard
• The SPIRIT Consortium's IP-XACT standard, ratified in December as IEEE 1685 IP-XACT-2009, a Standard Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-Using IP within Tool Flows.

They join Accellera standards approved by the IEEE earlier in 2009:

• IEEE 1801, a Standard for Design and Verification of Low Power Integrated Circuits and
• IEEE 1450.6.1, a Standard for Describing On-Chip Scan Compression.

IEEE standardization benefits semiconductor and the electronics industry by providing, improving and distributing the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) standards that increase the productivity of engineers in the worldwide design community.

For information about how to obtain copies of these IEEE standards, please visit http://www.accellera.org/activities/ieee_activities/.

"The ratification of the IP-XACT specification as IEEE 1685 is a nice closing action as The SPIRIT Consortium moves towards completing its merger with Accellera. Many people have worked hard to get this successfully approved," said Ralph von Vignau, president of The SPIRIT Consortium. "These new IEEE EDA standards underscore the common drive behind our organizations and lay the foundation for a bright and valuable future."

"Working in collaboration with Accellera and The SPIRIT Consortium has resulted in a valuable and growing collection of standards for the electronic design automation industry under the IEEE Standards program," said Judith Gorman, Managing Director, IEEE-SA. "We look forward to continuing our work with Accellera so we can collectively advance ongoing innovations in the EDA industry."

About the 2009 IEEE Standards

IEEE 1685 IP-XACT provides for a machine readable XML structure for IP modules and systems databooks. The XML data documents many different aspects of electronic design elements, enabling designers using IP-XACT tools to automatically create many different expressions of a design in a consistent and correlated way. Design and verification engineers benefit from using this IP-XACT from the automation of testbench creation and exploration.

IEEE 1800, the SystemVerilog-Unified Hardware Design, Specification, and Verification Language Standard, unifies Verilog and SystemVerilog into a single language supporting multiple levels of electronic design abstraction for modeling and verification.

IEEE 1801 Standard for Design and Verification of Low Power Integrated Circuits (aka SystemVerilog) provides for portability of low-power design specifications that can be used with a variety of commercial products throughout an electronic system design, analysis, verification and implementation flow

IEEE 1450.6.1 Standard for Describing On-Chip Scan Compression (aka the Open Compression Interface standard or OCI) standardizes the interface between different suppliers' tools to enable vendor interoperability for test pattern generation and diagnosis.

Accellera's and The SPIRIT Consortium's IEEE Standards

Accellera, that will celebrate its tenth year anniversary at DVCon next week, has compiled an unsurpassed record as an industry consortium for productivity and professionalism, by producing more than one industry standard per year. Of these, twelve so far, have become the core of IEEE standards. In addition, two of the founders of Accellera, Dennis Brophy and Gabe Moretti, have also been instrumental in starting the IEEE-SA organization. The IEEE-SA gives companies an active role in the standardization process in the Design Automation industry, something that, until then, was only available to individual professionals.

The complete list of IEEE standards generated by the now joined Accellera and SPIRIT organization reads as follows:

• SystemVerilog or IEEE Std.1800
• Unified Power Format (UPF) or IEEE Std. 1801
• Open Compression Interface (OCI) or IEEE Std. 1450.6.1
• IP-XACT or IEEE Std. 1685
• VHDL or IEEE Std.1076
• Verilog or IEEE Std. 1364
• Property Specification Language (PSL) or IEEE Std.1850
• Standard Delay Format (SDF) or IEEE Std. 1497
• Delay and Power Calculation System (DPCS) or IEEE Std. 1481
• Advanced Library Format (ALF) or IEEE Std. 1603
• Open Model Interface (OMI) or IEEE Std. 1499
• Standard Delay Format (SDF) or IEEE Std. 1497