One-man EDA startup blasts Accellera standards org

One-man EDA startup blasts Accellera standards org
By Richard Goering, EE Times
February 28, 2002 (12:16 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020226S0041

MINNEAPOLIS — The Accellera standards organization is a "collusive trade organization" that has "wrecked" the former International Verilog Conference, according to a letter being circulated by Pragmatic C Software Corp., an EDA startup here. The letter apparently stems from the company's failure to win a seat on Accellera's board of directors.

Pragmatic C is a one-person company led by Steve Meyer, its president, who has been working on Verilog simulation products for the past decade. Its Cver Verilog simulator is used by Antrim Design Systems Inc. as part of its mixed-signal simulation environment, and Meyer has been attempting to sell Cver on its own as a digital simulator.

"Pragmatic C does not want to have any association with Accellera because Accellera has become nothing more than a marketing organization for the few companies that make up the EDA aggregat ed monopoly," Meyer wrote in his letter. Meyer could not, however, point to anyone else in the EDA industry who shares his view.

"I don't know how much more open we can be," responded Dennis Brophy, chairman of Accellera. While declining to respond specifically to Meyer's accusations, Brophy said that Accellera membership is completely open and that the organization holds annual elections to determine who sits on the board. The next such election will be held this June at the Design Automation Conference.

"Some people would like to be guaranteed a board position, but the answer to that is 'No,' " Brophy said. "Corporate members are not compelled to vote every member to the board."

Pragmatic C was encouraged to join Accellera with the "express representation" that there would be an open board seat available for the company, Meyer said. He noted that the Accellera board has 15 slots, and there are currently only 12 corporate members, so a board seat for Pragm atic C should have been assured. Meyer was expecting to be elected to that seat in November, but the election for board seats didn't happen then.

Meyer, in fact, wrote that he attempted to attend the Nov. 8 Accellera board meeting, only to be "ejected by a Synopsys security person who falsely and publicly stated I had come to steal Synopsys software."

Meyer's letter also states that the IEEE Verilog 2000 reference manual is "unreadable," that the Verilog-AMS mixed-signal standardization effort has "basically turned into a program by Cadence to hinder standardization efforts," and that Accellera has destroyed the International Verilog Conference by merging it with the VHDL International User's Forum to form the International HDL Conference (HDLCon). That conference debuts March 11 in San Jose, Calif.

Veiled promise

Meyer isn't getting any help from Simon Davidmann, chief executive officer of Co-Design Automation Inc., who Meyer claims encouraged him to join Accellera and suggested that a board seat would be available. "I'm sorry to read Pragmatic C's letter," Davidmann said. "From Co-Design Automation's perspective, Accellera is a vital organization for the proliferation of standards and we're firmly behind it."

"I think Accellera has become a marketing organization," Meyer told EE Times. "I'm having trouble selling my digital simulator as well, and I see that as part of the pattern of the big companies having a monopoly."