The Push for Open Standards The industry momentum toward open standards has been propelled by the higher flexibility, greater control and lower costs provided when high quality source code is published as an industry standard and used as a foundation for added value products and services. Many large software companies such as Computer Associates, BEA Systems and Cadence Design Systems have donated proprietary technology to the industry to be used as the basis for an open standard. Normally the donation is infrastructure software that can be used as an application framework to simplify and accelerate higher value software development at the application level. What drives a company to open up its source code and share its technology with the industry? The donating company decides that the expansion of application development on its open framework provides a strategic advantage over its competitors closed framework. The donated source code will simplify the development of new applications, accelerate innovation and broaden accessibility of the framework. OpenAccess (OA) has more than 40 leading EDA tool and semiconductor vendors as part of the initial OA ecosystem. The expanding base of OA developers has the protection of a well controlled industry standard guided by a Change Team with the responsibility to approve proposed changes to the OpenAccess application programming interface (API) and reference database. The Change Team protects the investment of the OpenAccess Coalition companies by providing a balanced approach for reliability, compatibility and fostering new innovations through industry wide collaboration. Silicon Navigator has built a complete system based on Open Standards. The Linux operating system and OpenGL graphics environment provide powerful open source standards to complement OpenAccess. Silicon Navigator's RDE offers both C++ and TCL interfaces to functionality embedded behind a formal API that checks all parameters passing the interface. The customer's application has access to all the design data in the OpenAccess database and can directly control and configure Silicon Navigator products. How RDE Supplements OpenAccess RDE is delivered with all OpenAccess APIs and translators, and scripting tools, and the additions that have been made by Silicon Navigator to facilitate your adoption of OA.