BENGALURU, India — The Open Artwork System Interchange Standard (Oasis) file format, introduced by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) in late 2003, is seeing slower adoption than expected. Complexity of the new format and an exaggeration of the benefits of reduced disk file sizes may be to blame, industry observers say.
Oasis was developed by SEMI's data path task force to stop the losses arising from data inefficiency. Meant to replace the GDSII stream format, Oasis is several times more compact, represent flat data more efficiently. It's also 64-bit compatible. The Oasis 1.0 standard was approved by the SEMI worldwide lithography committee in July 2003 without any objections.
"The replacement of well-entrenched formats is always a slow process, usually driven only by necessity and not merely a claimed benefit. One can expect that leading-edge designs are the first ones to realize the practical value of such interoperability," said Steve Schulz, president and CEO of the Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2).
Si2, a consortium of semiconductor, electronic systems and EDA tool firms, may be right in stating that the replacement of any well-entrenched format, in this case GDSII by Oasis, will take time. But industry executives also speak of other factors that are causing the slow adoption of Oasis.
Paul Davis, executive vice president of SEMI, said the organization will not comment on the adoption or implementation of a standard, though it has procedures in place to justify the need for a new standards effort such as Oasis.
"Actually Oasis is not doing as well as everyone expected," said Gary Smith, founder and chief analyst of Gary Smith EDA. Asked what could be the reasons behind this, Smith said: "(I am) not sure, but something is up." Factors that may hasten its adoption, in Smith's opinion, include tools such as the two-way OpenAccess-to-Oasis translator that Softjin Technologies recently announced.
One reason for the slow adoption, executives said, is because Oasis has been overly hyped as a means for on-disk data size reduction. "Oasis has the danger of just meeting this objective only, and of falling short of other higher value-added advantages required to replace the well-established GDSII. Oasis may require a few more standardized extensions" said Ravi R. Pai, managing director of Softjin Technologies, which has brought out a few tools to hasten the adoption of Oasis.
Though much of the talk about Oasis is, in fact, centered around its capacity of on-disk data size reduction, SEMI clearly had other factors in mind when it created Oasis as a standard.
