Intel's Eric Lish elected chair of Open SystemC Initiative

SAN JOSE, USA: The Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI), an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing SystemC™ as an industry-standard language for electronic system-level (ESL) design, announced Eric Lish has been elected Chairman of the Board, succeeding his Intel colleague, Ken Tallo.

In addition, ARM’'s John Goodenough was named a Director, with no other changes made to the board. The current officers are President Mike Meredith of Forte Design Systems; Executive Director Patrick Sheridan, CoWare; Treasurer Stan Krolikoski, Cadence Design Systems; and Secretary Paul Tauber of Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP. Directors are Goodenough; Dr. Laurent Maillet-Contoz, STMicroelectronics; Michel Genard, Virtutech; Mark Glasser, Mentor Graphics; Ralph von Vignau, NXP Semiconductors; and Markus Willems, Synopsys.

OSCI is also pleased to welcome two new Associate Corporate Members: Qualcomm, a leading provider of business-to-business wireless enterprise applications and services; and OFFIS, an application-oriented research and development institute and center of excellence for selected areas of information technology based in Oldenburg, Germany.

Lish, Manager of Virtual Platforms within Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group in Chandler, Ariz., looks forward to his term as OSCI Chairman, and said he believes OSCI and SystemC are playing a critical role in managing design complexity.

“It is necessary for the industry to raise the level of abstraction from the modeling and architecture perspective,” Lish said. “Platform level design is growing evermore complex and traditional design methods can’t keep up. Abstraction is one area that can be addressed to make a significant difference. As an industry, we must come together to focus on system-level issues to help enable the growth of technologies. I want OSCI to do all it can to act as an enabler, providing the entire design ecosystem with a clear, accessible path to standards-based system-level design.”

OSCI recognizes the increased membership as an indication of the industry’s acceptance of the intensive standards work that the organization has been doing over the past year. OSCI recently announced significant milestones have been achieved by three of its working groups: the Transaction-level Modeling Working Group (TLM WG), the Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) WG, and the Synthesis WG.

These achievements include the public release of a TLM-2.0 Reference Manual formally describing APIs and semantics; completion of the public review of the AMS Draft 1 standard; and most recently, the release of a synthesis subset draft now available for public review at www.systemc.org.

In addition, OSCI also formed the Configuration, Control and Inspection (CCI) WG earlier in the year to streamline the portability of models across tools.

“I am pleased to welcome Qualcomm and OFFIS as new associate corporate members of OSCI,” said Lish. “We look forward to their contributions to our technical working groups, as we continue to grow the SystemC ecosystem and advance SystemC standards that benefit the electronics industry worldwide.”

With the addition of Qualcomm and OFFIS, OSCI’s Associate Corporate Members number 25 companies.