Accellera Systems Initiative – or Accellera – is a standards organization well-regarded by the electronic design automation (EDA) ecosystem that’s also served by the ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community. Lu Dai, Senior Director of Technical Standards at Qualcomm, has chaired the Accellera Board of Directors since 2017. I recently spoke with Dai about the importance and efficacy of semiconductor industry standards.

Smith: Standards are a way of life in EDA and across the semiconductor industry. Why are they so important?

Dai: Accellera Standards represent a collaboration of the best ideas in the industry to support product development. They help build an ecosystem and foster innovation through sharing of ideas and practices instead of re-invention.

Smith: Accellera was formed when Open Verilog International and VHDL International, two important verification organizations, merged in 2000. What is Accellera’s greatest standards success to date?

Dai: Our SystemVerilog is our biggest success because it united Verilog and VHDL, the standards that started Accellera, though we’ve produced a number of compelling standards including Verilog, VHDL, System Verilog, SystemC, UPF and UVM, our most downloaded standard. It can be downloaded for free as part of our IEEE GET Program. Additionally, a video on UPF is the most watched of our videos worldwide. Among our forum discussions, SystemC is the most active of our standards.
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