Over the last 5 weeks, I have spanned nine countries visiting with Si2’s members across Europe and Asia, returning on Wednesday. Cities included London, Cambridge, Brussels, Eindhoven, Leuven, Paris, Grenoble, Tokyo, Yokohama, Hsinchu, and Seoul. Calling it a “world tour” may be a bit of a stretch, but this is about as close as I’ll ever get (unless my local Austin band suddenly becomes famous and lands a global tour gig, but I’m not holding my breath).

Hectic though they may be, I truly enjoy these annual “tours” – to sit down face-to-face with so many industry leaders in their own work environment, meeting with their engineering teams, and connecting on a much more personal level. These trips offer an opportunity to gain deeper understanding of the needs and priorities of so many companies that are setting the pace for our industry’s growth and innovation. Naturally, there are numerous large corporate heavyweights on our itinerary, but we also visit startups, some working from within “technology incubators” that wow us with amazing levels of innovation, passion, and efficiency. While funding ability within this economic climate varies widely, this creative spirit is alive and well across the globe, just as much as it is within Silicon Valley. By listening to each organization’s unique circumstances, we can then better understand how to architect and phase standards efforts that satisfy the greatest possible set of shared priorities, while avoiding areas of ambiguity or conflict.

While extended economic malaise has left us with permanent tectonic shifts across the industry, I heard loud and clear that standards matter every bit as much today as ever before. In fact, the need to find efficiencies has forced new ways to automate and new ways to collaborate. Most of the time this requires supporting standards as the lifeblood of technical data exchange for enabling effective business commerce. This is true in established areas that need better efficiencies, and even more so for new growth niches that are being held back by confusion and fragmentation.

The topic area that seemed the most timely on this trip was OpenPDK, which took center stage. I should have expected this, because nearly every company touches PDKs in some way, and the data is getting more complex. Achieving commonality is made much more complex because today’s production environments are using a variety of formats and languages that are difficult to replace, yet all know we can and must find ways to do better. There is clearly an increased emphasis on differentiated analog and custom design out there.

OpenAccess is always a primary topic of engagement. I am gratified to hear that many companies are either expanding their use of OpenAccess this year, or planning first production deployment. A large majority are quite pleased with it’s current state; some are glad to hear about recent new features or the in-work enhancements to better scale our operational model. Many have delayed their production deployments for up to several years, to sync with vendor tool upgrade decisions.

I also found that more companies than I had realized have been feeling increased pain in the area of DRC rule decks, and are eagerly awaiting the release of OpenDFM out of the DFM Coalition. The pain levels are primarily associated with managing QA across multiple DRC formats, complications arising from increasing variability and new DFM rules, and complexities due to industrial partnerships requiring sharing of PDKs and libraries.

Low-power is an ever-present priority, but companies are still struggling to fully incorporate low-power intent across their design flows. Part of this is the multi-format issue (this includes some who remain using in-house formats, and are telling their vendors to translate into either CPF or UPF). The general case seems to be starting out with basic low-power intent using UPF for synthesis, then using CPF for the implementation flow. Users of CPF seem very pleased with it and it’s direction. Still, interoperability remains a problem (there was appreciation for the LPC’s recently-released Interoperability Guide that maps between CPF and IEEE-1801).

While many companies care about continued device and feature integration, fewer plan to rely on advanced process nodes to do it. There is good long-term potential for 3D stacked die to fulfill some of that need – but only after a host of technical and business issues can be resolved first. I am not sensing urgency here, but in general solid interest.

In summary, I found that business activity has restored to near-previous levels, with renewed enthusiasm but with fewer staff and a cautious revenue outlook for years to come. The value of standards has not declined, even though the ability to support them with staff resources has become more tightly managed and focused on direct areas of pain and need.