Accellera Announces the Formation of the Clock Domain Crossing Working Group

New Working Group to Focus on Defining a Standard CDC Collateral Specification

Elk Grove, Calif., January 23, 2023 -- Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera), the electronics industry organization focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, announced today the formation of the Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) Working Group (WG). The charter of the new working group is to define a standard CDC collateral specification to ease SoC integration.

“Accellera’s mission is to collaborate to innovate and deliver global standards that improve design and verification productivity for electronics products,” stated Lu Dai, Chair of Accellera. “Our newest working group will address the current incompatibility of collateral generated by different CDC verification tools, which will help to greatly improve productivity. If you’re not currently a member of Accellera and would like to help shape the development of this standard, we encourage you to join and provide your input.”

“Our objective is to develop a standard format to capture CDC/RDC/Glitch intent,” stated Dammy Olopade, CDC Working Group Chair. “This will enable interoperability of CDC collateral generated by different CDC verification tools. We have been meeting as a proposed working group since September, and there has already been tremendous industry support. During the upcoming working group meetings, we will focus on the effort to produce a normative Language Reference Manual (LRM),” Olopade concluded.

Background on Clock Domain Crossing Standardization
SoC teams cannot reuse IP-level CDC collateral in the SoC environment if both teams use different CDC verification tools. This scenario is causing a CDC verification problem when the SoC teams source IP from IP providers that use a different tool for their own CDC verification. To perform holistic SoC-level verification, additional resources are needed to reconverge the IP with the verification tool used by the SoC team. Redoing IP-level CDC verification is time consuming and labor intensive. Standardization on CDC collateral will bring significant benefits to not only product companies, but also IP design houses, EDA tool companies, and the entire ecosystem.

The first CDC Working Group meeting will be held Wednesday, January 18, 7:00-9:00am PT. The initial meeting will focus on the goals for the working group, its structure, and a timeline. For more information about the CDC WG, visit here. If you are not already an Accellera member and are interested in joining to participate in the working group and the ongoing development of the standard, visit here

About Accellera Systems Initiative

Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote and advance system-level design, modeling, and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development and, as part of its ongoing partnership with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org. Find out more about membership.