Tech Giants Google and NVIDIA Join Board Shaping Future of Chip Design

ROUND ROCK, TX – January 09, 2026 – A pivotal shift is underway in the high-stakes world of semiconductor design, signaled by the newly announced 2026 Board of Directors for Si2’s OpenAccess Coalition. While the annual announcement of an industry consortium's leadership is typically routine, this year's roster reveals a strategic realignment, with technology behemoths Google and NVIDIA taking seats at the table. Their inclusion on the 16-member board underscores a powerful industry-wide current pulling chip design away from siloed, proprietary systems and toward a more collaborative, interoperable future.

The OpenAccess Coalition, operating under the Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2), is the steward of the industry’s most widely used open standard for design data. The decision by Google and NVIDIA to join its leadership council in 2025, now formalized in the 2026 board, is a testament to the growing consensus that open standards are no longer a niche interest but a critical catalyst for innovation in an increasingly complex and competitive landscape.

The New Power Players: A Bet on Openness

The arrival of Google and NVIDIA on the OpenAccess board is far more than a symbolic gesture. It reflects a calculated strategic interest from two of the most influential forces in technology today, both of which are heavily invested in developing custom, cutting-edge silicon.

For Google, this move aligns perfectly with its demonstrated commitment to democratizing hardware development. The company has been a major proponent of open-source initiatives, most notably through its partnership with SkyWater Technology Foundry to release the Sky130 Process Design Kit (PDK). By making a production-grade PDK freely available, Google lowered the barrier to entry for startups, researchers, and even hobbyists to design and fabricate real chips. Its participation in the OpenAccess Coalition represents a logical next step: influencing the foundational data standards that govern how these designs are created and shared, thereby fostering a more vibrant and accessible ecosystem.

NVIDIA, the undisputed leader in GPUs and AI acceleration, has an equally compelling reason to champion open standards. The company's complex chips are at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution, and their design process involves intricate workflows that rely on a multitude of specialized Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. By participating in the OpenAccess board, NVIDIA gains a direct hand in shaping a standard that promotes seamless interoperability between these tools. This streamlines its own massive internal design efforts, reduces friction in the development cycle, and ensures that the broader ecosystem of tool vendors can effectively support its next-generation architectures.

A United Front: The Titans of Tech Align

The strategic weight of the OpenAccess Coalition is best understood by looking at the full roster of its 2026 Board of Directors. It reads like a who's who of the global semiconductor industry, uniting fierce competitors and critical supply chain partners in a common cause. The board now represents 16 industry titans:

• Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
• Cadence Design Systems
• Google LLC
• IBM Corporation
• Intel Corp.
• Keysight Technologies
• MediaTek Inc.
• Micron Technology, Inc.
• Microsoft
• NVIDIA
• Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
• Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
• Siemens Industry Software, Inc.
• SK hynix Inc.
• Synopsys, Inc.
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC)

This collective includes the world's leading chip designers (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm), foundries (TSMC, Samsung), memory manufacturers (Micron, SK hynix), and the “Big Three” EDA vendors (Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens). This diverse group oversees the coalition's operations, including the technical Change Team that manages the evolution of the standard itself, ensuring it meets the demands of next-generation chipmaking.

What is OpenAccess and Why Does It Matter?

To understand the significance of this alignment, it is essential to grasp what OpenAccess is—and what it is not. It is not a single piece of software or a simple file format. Instead, OpenAccess is a standardized Application Programming Interface (API) and a unified data model for the information that constitutes an integrated circuit design.

Historically, chip design flows were a patchwork of proprietary tools from different vendors, each with its own internal database and format. Moving a design from one tool to the next required a fragile and inefficient process of data translation. This created vendor lock-in, slowed down innovation, and added significant overhead to design cycles. OpenAccess was created to solve this problem.

Originating from a database technology contributed by Cadence Design Systems to Si2 in 2002, the standard provides a common language for EDA tools. It allows applications from different vendors to access and manipulate design data in a single, shared database without constant translation. This enables “hybrid design flows,” where a company can select the best-in-class tool for each specific task—synthesis, placement, routing, verification—and have them work together seamlessly. The result is greater efficiency, faster development, and more flexibility for design teams.

Navigating a Landscape of Open and Closed Ecosystems

The growing influence of the OpenAccess Coalition is happening within a broader industry-wide movement toward openness. This movement exists on a spectrum. On one end are the powerful, deeply entrenched proprietary toolchains from the major EDA vendors. On the other end is a burgeoning ecosystem of fully open-source projects like the OpenROAD Project, a DARPA-funded initiative to create a complete, automated “RTL-to-GDSII” flow, and the open instruction set architecture RISC-V.

OpenAccess occupies a crucial middle ground. While the source code for its API is proprietary to its members, it functions as an open standard that bridges the gap between the closed and fully open worlds. It provides the interoperability needed for established companies to integrate new, innovative tools into their existing, production-proven workflows. For startups and smaller companies, it lowers the barrier to entry by ensuring their specialized tools can plug into a design flow that uses software from major vendors.

The strengthened 2026 board, energized by the strategic vision of Google and NVIDIA, is now better positioned than ever to advance this mission. Their collective influence will likely accelerate the adoption of OpenAccess, encouraging even greater interoperability and pushing the entire industry toward a more collaborative model. This alignment is not merely an administrative update; it is a strategic maneuver that will shape how the next generation of complex semiconductors are designed, fostering an environment where innovation can thrive across the entire ecosystem.