I’m looking back at the progression of the Open Compression Interface standard (OCI), now that it has been officially ratified by the IEEE as IEEE-Std 1450.6.1, “Standard for Describing On-Chip Scan Compression”. I wrote about OCI entering the balloting phase of IEEE standardization a little over a year ago. This standard allows design automation tools used for creating chip test programs to interoperate.

Chip testing is a complex, expensive undertaking with enormous numbers of test patterns required to check a chip’s functionality and performance. Electronic design automation tools are used to generate the massive amounts of patterns because the task is virtually impossible without automation. To handle the test patterns more efficiently, a technique called “on-chip scan compression” was developed by test engineers, using part of the chip itself. New EDA tools were created that supported the new technique. Yet, tool vendors used different means for passing data between their own tools. (Sound familiar?)

In the summer of 2005, the board of Accellera was asked to approve a working group that would come up with a standard for describing on-chip test data compression structures. If test tools used this interface standard instead of their own methods for passing data, customers would have greater freedom of choice among tools.

True of any standards effort, there were concerns. Would the algorithms inside the tools be standardized, effectively making the tools unsellable? Would one tool vendor’s format be forced down the throats of the rest? Would any key players refuse to participate in the working group? (Fortunately, it turned out that the answer was “no” to all.)

As I attended an Accellera board meeting that summer, I had to decide on behalf of Synopsys whether to vote “yes”  or “no” on the formation of the working group. With serious concerns still being aired, I had quite a deliberation happening in my head. The board took a break before the vote, and I was surprised how easy my decision became. Every member of the board who represented a company that was a customer of mine either took me aside to talk or whispered to me in passing. They all said, “You had better approve the working group. We really need this standard.”

Now that the OCI standard has completed its full approval process through Accellera and the IEEE, it feels good to know that when the customers said, “Do it!”, I did.