Accellera Approves New VHDL Standard, an Applications Programming Interface to Improve Design Portability.

NAPA, Calif. -- Accellera, the electronics industry organization focused on electronic design automation standards, announced today that its members approved a new VHDL standard, a VHDL Applications Programming Interface (API) known as VHPI, late last month (June 28, 2006). This standard was transferred to the IEEE for their consideration as an amendment to the VHDL standard, IEEE Std. 1076(TM)-2002, earlier this month.

VHPI provides a formal, object-oriented informational model of a VHDL design as it is processed by a VHDL tool. It provides comprehensive access to post-analysis, post-elaboration, and runtime information through a compact C-language API. This is useful for building non-native VHDL models and applications that are portable from simulator to simulator. Applications enabled by the VHPI include library and post-analysis applications such as browsers and lint tools and applications such as debugging, results-recording and co-simulation that extend a simulation environment.

"Our proven working relationship with the IEEE helps us speed the process of VHDL ratification by the IEEE," remarked Shrenik Mehta, chairman of Accellera. "We have plans in place to continue to work on more VHDL updates and to support the standard as it goes through the IEEE standardization process."

"Thanks goes to the VHPI technical team, lead by Francoise Martinolle, for their effort in bringing this work to Accellera and then to the IEEE VHDL Analysis and Standardization Group (VASG) for ratification," said Jim Lewis, IEEE VASG Chair. "With Accellera putting its financial and technical support behind VHDL, it has been enjoyable to watch the energy within the EDA user and vendor communities grow."

Lance Thompson, Accellera's VHDL Technical Committee (TC) Chair added, "The VHPI work represents another successful Accellera-backed standardization effort. The Accellera VHDL Technical Committee (TC) has put forward additional VHDL revisions for Accellera's approval at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in July, 2006. The Accellera VHDL TC will host an open meeting at DAC to discuss additional work plans. We encourage all companies to join Accellera and help further our work through Accellera's membership-based funding model."

The VHPI standard is available at www.accellera.org.

About VHDL, the IEEE and Accellera

The IEEE granted Accellera permission to create derivative works and return them to the IEEE for publication. The IEEE continues to own the copyright for and is the sole publisher of VHDL.

Accellera provides a framework that enables the technical work of the committee, logistics, and the infrastructure for obtaining and distributing required funds and resources.

Accellera VHDL Technical Committee has 55 technical members representing 10 member companies and numerous non-member companies. See http://www.accellera.org/activities/vhdl for more information.

About Accellera

Accellera provides design and verification standards for quick availability and use in the electronics industry. The organization and its members cooperatively deliver much-needed EDA standards that lower the cost of designing commercial IC and EDA products. As a result of Accellera's partnership with the IEEE, Accellera standards are provided to the IEEE standards body for formalization and ongoing change control. Over the years, Accellera has developed eight standards that have been ratified by the IEEE. Accellera's recent successes in advanced design and verification language standards include SystemVerilog and PSL. For more information about Accellera, please visit www.accellera.org.

Notes to editors:
Acronyms
IEEE      Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
VHDL      Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) Hardware
          Description Language

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