Standards and Collaboration Perspectives: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow [Perspectives

Abstract

This special issue of Design and Test displays and describes some of the standards that are in current use and ongoing development in our industry. This is a useful update on the standards activities that make our professional lives more understandable, productive and predictable; and that allow opportunity for our companies to expand markets and their position in those markets because they can design to known standards. It is worth noting, however, that this special issue of Design and Test is covering only one industry the Electronic Design Automation, albeit a very important one. Essentially, every industry, and in fact, every human endeavor seeks to organize its world in ways that make it more understandable, predictable, and dependable. It has been that way from the dawn of human existence (Calendars anyone?). A common, yet still fun example, is the ease of use that standard electrical wall sockets provide within a country, and the extreme annoyance and frustration caused by a lack of standards between countries. Yesterday, the IC industry was a community of relatively self-contained Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDM). Today, the industry has disaggregated into design companies, Intellectual Property (IP) component providers, EDA vendors, foundries, and Outsourced Assembly and Test companies (OSAT), and the scope addressed by IDMs continues to shrink.. This has created new interfaces in the supply chain and in the design flows that are used to develop the products. These new interfaces dictate that new standards be deployed throughout the development flow. Tomorrow, if the past is any predictor of the future, the number of interfaces will continue to increase and the standards that define the efficient use of those interfaces will grow in importance to the cost effective manufacture of electronic systems. Standards, either de-facto or de-jure, enable a high level of sophistication of integrated circuit design and manufacture of todays systems with todays supply chain and with an unprecedented level of reuse of partial or complete designs and design flows. This article will describe the lay of the land in standards to capture the current state and what the future portends. A key factor in development of standards is that they are driven by and drive the business interests of companies in the ecosystem. Any standard that misses this point is doomed to failure. Successful standards embrace it and their eventual adoption creates greater opportunities for the enterprises that apply them.