Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2)

What Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) does

Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1988 (originally as the CAD Framework Initiative, renamed Si2 in 1998) and headquartered at 1 Chisholm Trail, Suite 450, Round Rock, Texas. Si2 operates as an industry consortium providing collaborative technology and services that enable semiconductor design integration through industry-accepted standards. The organization serves approximately 65-70 corporate members spanning EDA tool vendors (Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens EDA, Keysight EDA), semiconductor foundries (TSMC, Samsung, Intel, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, SK hynix), fabless design companies (NVIDIA, Qualcomm, IBM, NXP, Texas Instruments), and academic institutions, with a lean staff of 1-10 full-time engineers and consultants who facilitate co-development.

Si2's core product portfolio is organized into five membership-based coalitions. The OpenAccess Coalition maintains the world's most widely used open reference design database with a 2000+ class extensible C++ API and scripting wrappers in Python, Ruby, and tcl. The Compact Model Coalition standardizes gold-standard SPICE simulation models (BSIM, HiSIM, HICUM, MEXTRAM, PSP, ASM-HEMT) developed with leading university groups. The Unified Power and Thermal Coalition extends the IEEE 2416 UPM standard with software tools for system-level power analysis. The LLM Benchmarking Coalition provides the CVDP benchmark suite for evaluating AI on RTL coding and verification tasks. Si2 Base membership provides access to Special Interest Groups and OpenStandards Working Groups exploring emerging areas like AI/ML in EDA and 3D-IC design.

Si2's revenue model is membership-dues-based, with corporate member dues scaling with company revenue and tiered by coalition participation (Si2 Base, OpenAccess Coalition, CMC, UPTC, LBC). Academic members participate free of charge. Members gain access to member-exclusive source code, reference implementations, and secure collaboration portals. The organization also distributes public standards (LEF/DEF, CMC models, Open-Cell/FreePDK libraries) under open-source licenses as a top-of-funnel for membership recruitment, and co-hosts the International Compact Modeling Conference with IEEE EDS. Recent strategic priorities include AI-for-EDA standards (AI for EDA Ontology, CVDP benchmark), policy engagement via NSTC membership, and expansion of the academic and international member base.

Name

Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2)

Legal name

The Silicon Integration Initiative Inc.

Website

https://si2.org

Company type

Private

Founded year

1988

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Si2 is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit consortium founded in 1988 that provides collaborative technology and interoperability standards for the semiconductor design ecosystem, serving ~70 corporate members across EDA vendors, foundries, and fabless companies through membership-based coalitions.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

EDA Standards and Interoperability

NAICS

Business Associations (813910)

SIC

Services-Membership Organizations (8600)

akta.pro primary industry

Technical Committees, Working Groups & Expert Panels (BPADANAB)

akta.pro secondary industry

Standards Development & Publishing (SDOs, Technical Standards) (MPAJACAB)

Keywords

• EDA interoperability standards
• Semiconductor design coalitions
• OpenAccess reference database
• SPICE compact modeling
• Semiconductor power modeling

Headquarters

HQ city

Austin

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Services

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Others

Revenue model

1. Corporate Membership Dues: Corporate members pay annual dues based on company revenue. There is an initiation fee for new members. Different membership tiers exist: Si2 Base (enables participation in SIGs, OWGs, and includes UPTC and LBC), OpenAccess Coalition (includes Si2 Base plus OpenAccess content), UPTC (Unified Power and Thermal Coalition), LBC (LLM Benchmarking Coalition), and CMC (Compact Model Coalition with dues based on number of standard models designated). Dues scale with member company revenue, enabling new companies to lower barrier to entry.
2. Academic Membership: Academic members are individuals enrolled or employed full-time at accredited colleges or universities with research related to EDA, semiconductor, or electronics industries. Academic members do not pay annual dues.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels4 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Si2 is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit membership organization that develops, maintains, and evolves collaborative technology and shared standards for semiconductor design integration. Its core offerings are four member-funded coalitions (OpenAccess, Compact Model Coalition, Unified Power and Thermal Coalition, and LLM Benchmarking Coalition) that deliver reference implementations, standardized SPICE models, the IEEE 2416 UPM power-modeling standard, and the CVDP LLM benchmark, along with public open standards such as LEF/DEF that members and the broader industry can adopt.

Product overview

Si2 is a not-for-profit membership organization providing a collaborative environment and access to shared solutions for semiconductor design. The portfolio centers on the OpenAccess Coalition with its extensible 2000+ class C++ API on a managed multi-user database for hybrid EDA design flows. The Compact Model Coalition standardizes SPICE simulation models (BSIM, HiSIM, HICUM, MEXTRAM, PSP, GaN HEMT) through collaborative development with academic and industry partners. The LLM Benchmarking Coalition evaluates LLMs for semiconductor design using the CVDP benchmark framework. The Unified Power and Thermal Coalition develops and extends the IEEE 2416 UPM standard for system-level power modeling with member-accessible software tools (upmPowerCalc, upmce, upmcc, upmip). Si2 Base membership provides access to Special Interest Groups (AI/ML, 3D-IC) and OpenStandards Working Groups. Public offerings include LEF/DEF format specifications, CMC Standard Models with Verilog-A source code, Open-Cell/FreePDK Libraries, member-contributed solutions, and OpenStandards publications including the recently released AI for EDA Ontology.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• OpenAccess Coalition membership Member-funded coalition supporting the evolution of the world's most widely used open reference design database for integrated circuit design, providing a 2000+ class extensible C++ API on a managed multi-user database, with scripting wrappers in Python, Ruby, and tcl via the oaScript extension. Members co-develop, QA, and synchronize changes across all major EDA tools through the Change Team.
• Compact Model Coalition membership Member-funded coalition of industry and academic leaders (TSMC, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, Texas Instruments, NXP and others) that selects, develops, funds, and standardizes gold-standard SPICE simulation models for semiconductor circuit design, including BSIM-BULK, BSIM-CMG, BSIM-IMG, BSIM-SOI, HiSIM2, HiSIM_HV, HiSIM_SOI, HICUM/L0, HICUM/L2, MEXTRAM, PSP, L-UTSOI, and ASM-HEMT.
• LLM Benchmarking Coalition membership Member-funded coalition that creates evaluation datasets and metrics for high-quality LLMs used in semiconductor design, anchored on the public CVDP (Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems) benchmark with 783+ problems across 13 task categories covering RTL generation, verification, debugging, specification alignment, and technical Q&A.
• Unified Power and Thermal Coalition membership Member-funded coalition improving and extending the IEEE 2416 Unified Power Model (UPM) standard for IP and system-level power modeling, delivering the UPM Software Suite (upmPowerCalc, upmce, upmcc, upmip) exclusively to UPTC members.
• Si2 Base membership (SIGs and OWGs) Foundational membership tier that enables participation in Special Interest Groups (SIGs) exploring emerging topics such as AI/ML in EDA and 3D-IC design, and OpenStandards Working Groups (OWGs) prototyping new standards and solutions. Includes UPTC and LBC at no additional cost.
• LEF/DEF public standard downloads Publicly downloadable industry-standard formats for place-and-route design tools (Library Exchange Format and Design Exchange Format) developed originally by Cadence Design Systems and distributed by Si2 under the Apache-2.0 license.
• CMC Standard Models (public downloads) Publicly downloadable gold-standard SPICE device models for semiconductor circuit design (BSIM-BULK, BSIM-CMG, BSIM-IMG, BSIM-SOI, HiSIM2, HiSIM_HV, HiSIM_SOI, HICUM, MEXTRAM, PSP, L-UTSOI, ASM-HEMT and others) with Verilog-A source code. Members receive an 18-month exclusive production-access window.
• Open-Cell and FreePDK Libraries Open 15nm Open-Cell library from Silvaco and 45nm FreePDK Libraries available at no charge to universities and Si2 members for non-commercial research and standards development purposes.
• Si2 Member Contributed Solutions (open-source downloads) Publicly downloadable member-contributed open-source solutions including OA Multi-Patterning Technology (cdsColor), the cdsLib Plugin, oaScan database integrity checker, oaViewer (Synopsys), PyCell Studio (Synopsys), oaCompare (Synopsys), and the Analog Symbol Library of 66 OA v2.2 schematic symbols; distributed under Common Public License v1.0 or Apache-2.0.
• Si2 AI for EDA Ontology Public AI/ML ontology for the EDA domain, released on GitHub under Apache 2.0, providing formal representation of EDA concepts, relationships, and rules for agentic-system reasoning, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for agent discovery.
• CVDP (Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems) benchmark Open-source benchmark suite for evaluating LLMs on RTL coding and verification tasks, including 783+ problems across 13 task categories such as RTL generation, verification, debugging, specification alignment, and technical Q&A, available in both non-agentic and agentic formats.
• UPM Software Suite (member-exclusive) Software components for IEEE 2416 UPM power modeling, including upmPowerCalc (power analysis tool), upmce (static power contributor extraction), upmcc (power contributor characterization), and upmip (IP block UPM model creation); available exclusively to UPTC members.
• Open Model Interface (OMI) API CMC standard API based on the donated TMI2 (TSMC Model Interface), enabling advanced capabilities for simulating self-heating, aging, and extended design optimizations; freely available to the industry, with exclusive access to reference code and tutorials for CMC members.
• Si2 OpenStandards (public standards package including IEEE 2416 UPM v2.1 and archived standards) Publicly released standards packages including the Unified Power Model (UPM) v2.1 (IEEE 2416) and archived standards from the Low Power Coalition (CPF), Chip Package Co-Design (Open3D), Silicon Photonics TAB, OpenDFM, OpenPDK, and Open Modeling Coalition.
• VAMPyRE (Verilog-A Model Pythonic Rule Enforcer) Standalone compact-model parser and checker written in Python that flags problematic issues in Verilog-A models, including hidden-state variables, bias-dependent switch branches, integer division, and unused parameters; available on GitHub.
• LEF/DEF and OpenAccess data translators Bidirectional data translators between OpenAccess and industry-standard formats, including oa2verilog/verilog2oa, oa2spef/spef2oa, oa2lef/lef2oa, oa2def/def2oa, and oa2stream/stream2oa (for GDSII), enabling data exchange across EDA tool chains.
• International Compact Modeling Conference (ICMC) Annual conference co-sponsored by Si2, IEEE, and IEEE Electron Devices Society, focusing on compact semiconductor device model applications, development, and standardization; the 2026 edition will be held aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.
• IEEE 2416 Unified Power Model (UPM) standard IEEE Standard for Power Modeling to Enable System-Level Analysis, providing a semantic-rich power-modeling language for IP and system-level design with PVT-independent models enabling late binding of power data.

Quantifiable outcome

• Reduces design waste by making it easier to plug in different EDA tools for critical design blocks, allowing engineers to spend more time on design improvement
• +4 more outcomes

Named customers12 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration8 records

AI capability7 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

Twelve partnerships are on record, tiered minor and core.

• Arizona State UniversityminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2026Collaborating with ASU on AI/ML Schema OWG, utilizing the CircuitOps schema. ASU is one of two university efforts in the working group working on EDA schema representation.
• Drexel UniversityminorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2026Collaborating with Drexel University on AI/ML Schema OWG. Drexel has their own EDA schema representation. Part of the ontology validation collateral development.
• Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2025Si2 is a member of CAEML, an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. Dr. Leigh Anne Clevenger (Si2 VP) was elected Chair of the CAEML Industry Advisory Board for 2025. CAEML applies machine learning to microelectronic circuit and system design optimization.
• National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Si2 is a core member of the NSTC, a public-private consortium established by the CHIPS and Science Act. The NSTC aims to accelerate U.S.-led semiconductor research and innovation, build a workforce, and strengthen U.S. semiconductor leadership. Si2 engages with NSTC to facilitate access to EDA and design resources, tools, and shared datasets.
• IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Co-sponsor of the International Compact Modeling Conference (ICMC) with Si2. The ICMC focuses on compact semiconductor device model applications, development, and standardization.
• TSMC (donated TMI2 interface)coreTechnology or Integration · 1 January 2014TSMC donated the TSMC Model Interface (TMI2) to Si2, which became the foundation for the Open Model Interface (OMI) API standard. OMI provides designers with advanced capabilities for simulating self-heating and aging, and enables extended design optimizations.
• UC Berkeley (BSIM Group)coreTechnology or IntegrationDevelops BSIM-BULK, BSIM-CMG, BSIM-IMG, BSIM-SOI, and BSIM4 compact models. Led by Dr. Chenming Hu (TSMC Distinguished Professor Emeritus, recipient of US Medal of Technology and Innovation and IEEE Medal of Honor).
• Hiroshima UniversitycoreTechnology or IntegrationDevelops HiSIM2, HiSIM_HV, HiSIM_SOI, and HiSIM_SOTB compact models through Dr. Mitiko Miura-Mattausch's Ultra Scaled Devices Laboratory.
• CEA-LeticoreTechnology or IntegrationDevelops PSP and L-UTSOI compact models. CEA-Leti's Simulation and Compact Model Laboratory leads modeling for FDSOI technologies.
• Macquarie UniversitycoreTechnology or IntegrationDevelops ASM-HEMT (Advanced Spice Model for GaN HEMTs) and ASM-ESD compact models through Dr. Sourabh Khandelwal.
• Auburn UniversitycoreTechnology or IntegrationDevelops MEXTRAM bipolar transistor compact model through Dr. Guofu Niu.
• University of WaterloocoreTechnology or IntegrationDevelops MVSG_CMC compact model for GaN HEMTs in collaboration with MIT.

Scale indicators3 records

Recent moves7 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Direct peers

• Accellera Systems Initiative: Accellera is a not-for-profit EDA standards organization that develops SystemVerilog, UVM, and other EDA interoperability standards. It is the most direct peer to Si2 in the EDA standards development space, with a similar member-funded model and overlapping membership across EDA vendors and design houses.
• JEDEC Solid State Technology Association: JEDEC is the leading standards body for the semiconductor industry, covering memory, packaging, and other solid-state device specifications. It shares Si2's member-funded standards model and serves overlapping foundry, IDM, and design house members.
• SEMI (Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International): SEMI is a global industry association serving the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain, providing standards, events, and advocacy. It is comparable to Si2 as a semiconductor industry consortium with a member-funded model, though its scope is broader (equipment, materials, manufacturing).
• RISC-V International: RISC-V International is a non-profit consortium governing the open RISC-V instruction set architecture, with a member-funded model similar to Si2. It demonstrates the comparable charter of running a global, member-driven standards organization with major semiconductor and tech companies as members.

Broad incumbents

• IEEE Standards Association: IEEE SA is the standards publishing arm of IEEE and is the umbrella under which Si2's IEEE 2416 UPM standard is published. It is a broader incumbent that serves many industries, but it is directly comparable as the parent standards body for Si2's power modeling work.
• Object Management Group (OMG): OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit standards consortium that develops enterprise integration standards including UML, SysML, and DDS. It is comparable to Si2 as a member-funded standards development organization serving technology industries.
• Khronos Group: Khronos Group is an open consortium that creates royalty-free API standards including OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL. It shares Si2's member-funded model and its focus on cross-vendor interoperability standards for hardware and software ecosystems.

Emerging players

• Open Compute Project (OCP): OCP is a collaborative community that shares designs for data center hardware, including open silicon and chiplet initiatives. It is comparable to Si2 as an open hardware consortium working on interoperability, though it focuses on hyperscale infrastructure rather than EDA tool interoperability.
• CHIPS Alliance: CHIPS Alliance is a Linux Foundation project focused on open source silicon and chip design tooling, including RISC-V implementations and EDA tooling. It is comparable to Si2's open standards and shared infrastructure ethos, though it operates as a Linux Foundation sub-project rather than an independent consortium.

Others

• OpenPOWER Foundation: OpenPOWER Foundation is a not-for-profit consortium enabling collaborative development of the POWER instruction set architecture. It is thematically related to Si2 as a semiconductor industry consortium with member-funded governance, though it focuses on a specific processor ISA rather than EDA interoperability.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles11 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A1 record

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2)