Monday, April 23, 2007

UMC joins CPF standard alliance

UMC is the latest one to join the Cadence camp. Earlier this month, Cadence and TSMC had announced the availability of 65nm libraries from TSMC supporting CPF (Common Power Format).

The market forces will decide who the winner is; but the poor user has to cope with this standards battle in the interim.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is CPF(Common Power format) and UPF(Unified Power Format) the same initiative ?
I thought that Accellera had taken the initiative for UPF and Cadence for CPF. But their respective websites show that both are members of both the initiatives.
I'm confused.

Meenu Sarin said...

The Unified Power Format (UPF), backed by Synopsys Inc., Mentor Graphics Corp. and Magma Design Automation Inc., was released as an Accellera standard in late February. The Common Power Format (CPF), developed by Cadence Design Systems Inc. is managed by the Silicon Integration Initiative's (Si2's) Lower Power Coalition (LPC). These are 2 different standards.

Both UPF and CPF allow users to specify power intent and constraints throughout the RTL-to-GDSII design flow and use very similar approaches to do so.

Accellera was formed in 2000 through the unification of Open Verilog International and VHDL International to focus on identifying new standards, development of standards and formats, and to foster the adoption of new methodologies.

Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) is an organization of industry-leading companies and has as its mission to achieve industry adoption of collaborative technology and services
that deliver higher levels of silicon design integration.