"We're pleased to join SystemC now that it has reached a level of true openness," said Stan Krolikoski, vice president of marketing for the system-level design group at Cadence (San Jose, Calif.). "Cadence has always supported the goals of this organization, and we commend the Open SystemC steering committee for its concerted effort to ensure a truly open environment."

The Open SystemC Initiative, founded in September 1999 by companies from the EDA, semiconductor, and intellectual property (IP) sectors, including Synopsys Inc. and CoWare Inc., has a goal of developing support for system-level design and IP modeling based on a particular set of C++ class libraries.

Although the group was founded with the intention of following an open-source licensing model, there were early problems with some potential users and participants in the effort because users were asked to first sign licenses with Synopsys. And some EDA companies found it problematic that no mechanism was in place to rotate the members of the initiative's founding steering group of companies.

Cadence said it now believes that the Open SystemC steering committee has made progress to become an open organization, which prompted Cadence to join the group.

Cadence said it has always fully supported the goals of SystemC and other proposed system-level language initiatives, such as the ongoing Open Verilog International architectural language effort, and the SpecC Consortium. Cadence recently joined the latter effort. SpecC is a high-level variant of the C language intended to turn natural language specifications into executable models.

In a statement, the company said: "Cadence believes that a concerted industry-wide effort to develop a system-language that is eventually adopted by the IEEE will help both EDA vendors and users of that language. Moreover, Cadence believes that it can serve as a catalyst in helping such a language evolve."

Cadence has offered the Signal Processing Worksystem (SPW) high-level tool for many years, and it recently launched its Virtual Component Codesign (VCC) environment for use in the design and customization of system platform-based designs.

"Many of our SPW and VCC customers are members of Open SystemC and have asked us to join and help make the current SystemC offering an integrated system-language," said Grant Martin, senior architect in the system level design group at Cadence. "We are prepared to add our expertise to that of other industry leaders to help make that happen."

Cadence is now due to take part in the SystemC User's Forum, scheduled to take place at DAC on Wednesday (June 7).