Yesterday’s Si2 conference was a highlight of the week: a diverse program with loads of quality, relevant content, strong attendance throughout the day, and even some pretty interesting live demos of tools working with Si2 standards. Richard Goering wrote a very nice blog of the morning talks (click here), and fellow blogger Daniel Nenni (http://danielnenni.com) will be writing more about the technical content – please support their helpful blogging activities. Graham Bell even did an audio interview to be published on EDAcafe (http://www.edacafe.com).

In addition to the technical progress on OpenAccess, OpenDFM, Low Power Coalition, and OpenPDK, I had the distinct pleasure of presenting two award plaques. The first award went to Mark Mason of Texas Instruments, for his tireless work and excellent leadership with the other great team members of the DFM Coalition in turning OpenDFM into a reality. Mark had shared results of successful EDA vendor test cases with the crowd, noting that 1 line of OpenDFM code could represent up to 35 lines of code in other DRC engines, and that measured runtime performance was still the same as native DRC code. The second award went to Cadence Design Systems, for their long-standing commitment to OpenAcess and the OpenAccess Coalition these last 8 years. OpenAccess now has over 1.5M lines of code, and Cadence donates dozens of engineering resources, free of charge to industry, to maintain and enhance that code under the guidance of the Change Team. Both awards represent significant achievements with very significant results that help our industry be more efficient and effective.

For more on the full day’s activities, including all downloadable presentations, please visit http://www.si2.org/?page=1282. If you wish to join and participate at our next event, please contact us – we are always looking for good content and additional creative ideas.