Why the OSCI-Accellera Merger?

By now most of you will have heard and read about the merger Accellera and OSCI into the Accellera Systems Initiative.  A question that may linger after reading various press accounts is “why a merger”?  There are, of course, synergies in standards to be discovered and exploited– anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of current EDA standards will understand that.  But, why the drastic act of merging into a single organization with all of the difficulty and expense that such a merger entails? Was one of the two organizations in trouble and hain need of “rescue”?  If not, why not remain as two separate organizations,  and set up a technology cooperation agreement?

First, both organization were  doing fine both from a standards-setting and financial standpoint.  The merger happened to make things better, as opposed to preventing bad things from happening.  Then why not just set up a cooperation agreement of some sort and keep working independently?

To see the answer, consider that the “raw material” of any standards organization (EDA or not) is its workers and the technical knowledge that they bring to table.  This is true of many high-technology organizations, but the difference in a standards organization is that almost all of its “employees” are actually employed by somebody else.  There are the exceptions—some standards groups have a paid Chief Executive and staff, while others have paid administration.   However, those paid people are not the norm—most workers in standards groups receive a paycheck from a different company. 

To make matters more interesting, most workers in a standards organization are not paid by their actual employer to work full time or every a majority of their time on standards.  Again, there are exceptions—I, for example, am paid by Cadence to spend a lot of my time on standards-related activities, but even I have significant non-standards-related work.   This situation is even more dramatic  for most standards workers:  they have their “day job”— in the case of EDA standards, architecting and/or writing SW, doing design consulting, managing a group that does any of the preceding and so forth.  Their employer does “allow” them time to work in standards group, but it is usually not enough time to cover the standards work actually done by the employee—assuming that the employee actually worked the mythical 40 hour work week, instead of the open-ended work week many of us enjoy.

Further, while many companies do allow (and may require) employees to work in standards groups, the immediate bottom line is (understandably) usually still king.  For example, if an engineer is working on a project for his/her employer and deadlines get tight or are missed, the amount of time that the employee will be able to spend on “outside” activities often dries up.   Even when this sort of problem is avoided, an employee’s standards meeting schedule is almost never considered when his/her travel schedule is set.  Thus, it is not unusual to have group members calling in from airports or in the middle of the night from undisclosed locations.

All of this is not to complain, but to point out the realities that almost all “volunteers” in standards groups face.  Indeed, I highlight these obstacles because, they (to my mind) lead directly to the reason why forming the Accellera Systems Initiative made so much sense.  In particular, around the time that a merger began to be considered, it was becoming obvious that the standards that OSCI and Accellera had developed were starting to touch each other—the TLM 2.0 implementation in the UVM reference implementation was a case in point.  It also was clear that there were places where OSCI and Accellera standards were not as connected as might have been desired—the AMS offerings from each groups were cases in point.  Finally, although none of the officers of either group can tell the future, it did not take a large leap of faith to predict that there would be multiple other opportunities where OSCI and Accellera standards could benefit by having their disjoint groups work together.

A technology cooperation agreement would have been a good first step in the face of all of this, and such an agreement was discussed early in the negotiations that ultimately resulted in the merger.  However, such an agreement would not remove the organizational barriers that stood between Accellera and OSCI.  Those organizational barriers, viz., different rules (policies and procedures), different IP policies, very different cultures and so forth, were preventing the engineers that work in the two groups from cooperating as fully as they could.  Of course, with extra effort, OSCI and Accellera volunteers could have met and crafted joint standards, but not only would such joint standards been special cases (“one-offs”), this sort of interorganozational work would have made the various volunteers’ jobs that much harder. 

This is why the OSCI-Accellera merger makes so much sense to me.  By removing barriers, i.e., by uniting the two organizations “under one roof” and tearing down the interior walls under that roof, synergies between standards will be more easily exploited by the workers of the new organization.  Yes, some of those walls are not quite torn down yet—a common IP policy needs to be crafted, and each group comes with its own culture ready to be melded into a new culture, but the basic foundation (and roof!) is in place for new, as of yet undreamt, synergistic standards to be developed.

The workers in both Accellera and OSCI have, over the years, produced front-end EDA standards used in the Electronics Industry around the world, often after becoming IEEE and IEC standards.  Now they have fewer organizational barriers in their way as they develop the next generation of EDA standards.  This is why this merger had to happen.