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De Facto Standards

A standard that comes about because of widespread acceptance or adoption.
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A de facto standard is a standard that comes about because of widespread acceptance or adoption. It has not been worked on or approved by any standards body and may be controlled by a single company. GDS II is a de facto standard originally created by Calma and now owned by Cadence. Another example of a de facto standard within EDA is the adoption of the TCL/TK scripting language to control tools. While the language itself is a standard, its adoption by so many tools vendors counts as a de facto standard because there is no industry standard that says tools should have this scripting language built into them.