Last week OSCI and Accellera decided to join forces. To some extent, this might be viewed as the union of the abstract and the concrete. OSCI lives in the world of SystemC and TLM; much of what Accellera does is further down the abstraction stack (although UVM shows that Accellera was already moving up). 

To some extent these are two different worlds (when discussing verification recently with someone, I mentioned TLM… and got looked at like I had grown a second head because the person lived in the concrete pre-mask verification world). But if the vision of abstract-architecture-refined-to-finished-chip is to be realized, it can help to do that within a single body.

Minor details – like what the combined entity will be called – have yet to be worked out. The end of the year is pegged as the target for all such niceties.

This largely leaves Si2 as the other pre-IEEE standards body. Having two such entities ensures that it will still be possible to take two competing proposals from two competing companies and create two different standards through two different bodies*, both of them legit.

That’s SOP.

More in their release…

*Scroll to the last section…