The Si2 engineering staff that facilitates and supports more than 45-member companies has doubled in size in the last year with the goal of improving usability. Christy Pack joined in the fall of 2023 and is focusing on making the oaScript more sustainable. Carlo Barrientos joined in the spring of 2024 and is focusing on extension development and testing. Meanwhile, Ziyu Deng, a Ph.D. student and graduate research assistant in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University has joined Si2 as a coop intern for the summer to focus on ways to use OA for 3D-ICs.
As many OA users know, building OpenAccess is a complex task when it must be done from source code. There are considerable dependencies necessary for a successful build such as version compatibility, compiler option settings, and several required utilities. The result is a matrix of dependencies that are difficult to communicate. To overcome this, a new oaBuilder has been built to clearly communicate dependencies to the user. The oaBuilder checks the environment configuration, version compatibility, identifies missing utilities and dependent software and validates th environment before launching a long compile process. oaBuilder in now in Beta testing and will be available by the end of 2024.
The Si2 staff and OAC member companies have been busy in the last year on many other tasks as well in the last year. The OAC has made 7 releases, 35 fixes, and 8 enhancements. Data Model 6.0 will be eol’d and Data Model 6.1 will be the production version until Data Model 6.2 comes out later this year. Currently the oaScript Extension WG is working on the 5.1 release (with fixes and enhancements) and new Python documentation. The oaTranslator (oa2JSON/JSON2oa) extension is now passing tests and a 1.0 release is planned by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, the 1.1 release of oaxColor that implements the final features on the Cadence contribution document completed its ESG review on June 20th.
The OpenAccess Coalition also led the way in moving to the new Causeway collaboration tool from Omni Digital Solutions. This tool is used by multiple SDOs (Standards Development Organizations) and supports a member-based business model like Si2 much better than the previous solution. The Coalition has moved over to this new tool completely by March of 2023. In the first quarter of usage, 68 unique users from 32 different companies have accessed the new member portal. Among other things the new tools provides:
- Email lists
- Calendar
- Forum/Discussion
- Wiki
- Document storage
- Integrated with Bugzilla
- Integrated with GitLab
- Workgroup chair admin control
Finally, in addition to the new Si2 resources in support of OA, there have been important transitions in the member-driven leadership of the coalition. Tom Quan, TSMC, is retiring and we want to thank him for his very active participation in OAC over the years. We welcome aboard Haijun Feng, who will be replacing him. Greg Schaeffer (IBM), passed the role of Change Team Co-Architect to Adam Matheny (IBM). We want to thank Greg for his years of leadership and welcome Adam. Meanwhile, Hongmei Li (IBM) has stepped up and is now serving as OAC co-chair and Rudy Albachte (Intel) is returning to oaScript Workgroup Chair.
