Panel: Life Expectancy of Standards

Are today´s EDA standards meeting the needs of the market? Over the years, a number of EDA standards have evolved. Some of them have been developed by standards organizations and some of them are vendor-specific standards that have been placed in the public domain. EDA users are demanding design portability across multi-vendor solutions. This has resulted in a significant amount of standards activities during the last couple of years, specifically with VHDL and Verilog simulation standards, the CFI dynamic data interchange standard and the EDIF static data interchange standard. The promise of standards is to facilitate a multi-vendor EDA environment. To date, most multi-vendor environments have required significant custom engineering to become operational. This is costing the industry millions of dollars in wasted engineering resources. The relatively new science of information modeling promises to remove many of the ambiguities that existed in the older standards. Will the next generation of standards eliminate the need for this custom engineering? Are there too many overlapping standards in the industry? Is there a divergence in similar standards? Is there a need for certain proprietary standards to be put into the public domain? Are these standards evolving to meet the market needs? Do users have adequate input in defining these standards and are any of today´s standards becoming obsolete? These questions will be examined by a panel of industry experts to help users understand if this next generation of standards will meet the industry needs.