Yesterday I spent some time with Eric Lish, the Chair of OSCI. Eric is an Intel veteran, having spent 21 years, and counting, with "the other big blue" company. At present he manages the Virtual Platform Center of Excellence in Chandler Arizona.

In discussing OSCI's past achievements and future plans it became clear to me that if one had to identify the single most important contribution the consortium has made to EDA, one would have to choose TLM. Transaction Level Modeling was not a new concept before OSCI turned its attention to it. VHDL, in fact, the greatly misunderstood and poorly marketed language, can in fact be used for architectural exploration and modeling at the transaction level. But that is mostly water under the bridge, and there was the need to open the possibility of real architectural design in another environment, free of the legacy of the past.

The Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) announced that requirements for the configuration portion of the SystemC Configuration, Control and Inspection (CCI) standardization effort are now available for public review. They are currently available for download under open-source license. The public review period of the CCI Configuration Requirements Specification extends through April 2, 2010. The worldwide SystemC community of users, architects, ESL tool developers and IP providers are encouraged to participate and provide feedback using the CCI discussion forum.

Next week, specifically February 22 to 25, is a special time for those who have the responsibility to verify electronics designs or to develop tools to enable or improve such verification. DVCon, the annual conference dedicated to design verification will be held at the Double Tree hotel in San Jose. In addition to a strong program of technical papers, and tools vendors exhibits, the conference will also provide networking opportunities, a panel of industry leaders, tutorials, co-located events, a luncheon celebrating Accellera, the sponsor of DVCon, tenth anniversary, and even a panel designed to give you pointers should you wish to start your own EDA company.

Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) has announced the availability of version 2.2x2.1 of the OCP Modeling Kit. The new version is compatible with OSCI’s TLM 2.0.1, the most recent version of TLM 2. The work by OCP-IP’s System Level Design Working Group significantly increases performance, ease of use and ensures alignment with the OSCI 2.0 standard and is the most advanced TLM-2.0 based, industry-ready kit in existence today. The Kit is free as part of OCP-IP membership entitlement and will save users hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in development, documentation, and training cost which would be required to develop such kits independently.