Accellera Clock Domain Crossing Draft Standard 0.1 Now Available for Public Review

[Lynn Garibaldi]

Accellera has released the Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) Standard draft 0.1 for public review. Download the draft standard here.

The CDC Working Group was formed to define a standard CDC collateral specification to ease SOC integration. In-house and externally purchased IPs are often combined in SOCs. It can prove challenging to verify these SOCs because a mixture of verification tools and methodologies that do not integrate are sometimes used. Ensuring that a common clock domain crossing interface standard that every tool can translate their native format to and from is the intent of this standard. With this interface standard, every IP developer’s verification tool of choice is run to verify and produce collateral, and the standard format is generated for SOCs that used a different tool. With this CDC standard, efficiently translating from provided collateral into a tool of choice is possible for every SOC.

 This standard is intended to do the following:

• Enable all EDA vendors to develop tools that meet this specification in generated collateral
• Enable IP companies to generate collateral using various vendors and their tools
• Enable SOC companies to consume generated collateral from different vendors’ tools into their tool of choice

The public review is open through December 31, 2023. The CDC Working Group invites and encourages the community to participate in the review and provide feedback by posting comments and questions in this forum.

[sri.cvcblr]

Thanks, I've annotated my comments in a PDF. Some comments are sort of resolved as I read through the standard few times, but left them as I observed during first read.

Tried attaching it here - but max file size it says is 422.33 KB - while the origin PDF itself is 1.5MB. Please let me know how I can submit my notes.

Summary of my review:

1.  Simple, neat standard so far, kudos to the team!
2. Need formal BNF/TCL options as an annexure
3. Clock relationships section is outstanding - very well done!
4. Failure mode section can be expanded, enhanced
5. Relationship to multiple adjacent standards/formats need attention here (SV, VHDL, SDC, UPF, Liberty etc.)
6. Why not JSON as well? 

Thanks! Happy holidays!