OpenAccess

OpenAccess is a coalition amongst integrated circuit manufacturers to provide a standard for designing chips. It consists of an open standard data API and reference database supporting that API for IC design. The OpenAccess Coalition is a neutral organization of semiconductor industry companies that are leading this effort operating under Silicon Integration Initiative bylaws.

Advanced electronic design flows are a combinations of proprietary applications and copyrighted EDA databases, with many different file formats and syntaxes. As a result, significant efforts are required from IC CAD engineers to integrate them for particular projects. The resulting flows are often fragile, inefficient and therefore result in longer design cycles. This state of the affairs was the primary motivation for the OpenAccess effort.

As of 2005, OpenAccess was the only modern integrated circuit design database which is publicly available.

In 2005 the Cadence Berkeley Labs and the Silicon Integration Initiative launched the OpenAccesGear, a project to develop open source utilities on top of the OpenAccess database. Participants includued University of California at Berkeley, UCLA and UCSC. The OAGear project is currently suspended and unsupported - however the latest release and the forum discussions may be of educational use to many. Si2 has decided to offer OAGear as an unsupported project.

The OpenAccess coalition was formed in Q4 1999. The members issued a request-for-technology for existing technology, looking for a solution that was proven and would be commercially adopted, and that supported a broad set of EDA tools. As a result, the Cadence Genesis database and API was selected and now forms the technology base for OpenAccess.

The OpenAccess API is a C++ program interface to IC design data stored in an electronic design database with architecture designed to ensure easy integration of contributions from various companies which may implement database enhancements or add proprietary extensions. To this end, access to the reference database source code is provided.

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