VSIA says more designers adopt its methods

VSIA says more designers adopt its methods
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
October 27, 2000 (5:42 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001027S0052

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The IC design community is starting to adopt the work of the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA), which is trying to simplify the mixing and matching of virtual components for designers struggling with increased complexity and greater time-to-market pressures. The efforts of VSIA, which has released one standard and 19 specifications in its first four years, are showing signs of paying off.

At the organization's Fall member meeting this year, which was well attended despite its overlap with the IP2000 Europe conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, VSIA officials outlined increased user adoption as the organization moves forward and broadens its focus to tackle issues such as virtual component quality and verification.

Larry Rosenberg, technical committee chairman for VSIA, outlined the organization's accomplishments, including the recent release of its virtual component (VC) tagging standard designed to help companies track VC use through silicon production. The work, which was led by Artisan Components Inc., Mentor Graphics Corp., and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), is being adopted by UMC and by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., and other foundries are likely to follow, Rosenberg said.

"It is truly impressive how the industry is getting the message and adopting our specifications," he said.

Indeed, representatives from several large OEMs, including Philips and Nokia, came forward at the meeting to tell how their organizations are backing VSIA and applying its guidelines in hopes of streamlining their internal system-on-chip design processes.

Anssi Haverinen, research manager at Nokia, described how his company has assessed and adopted VSIA's Virtual Component Interface (VCI), which facilitates the use of internal and third-party virtual components in Nokia's mobile phone platforms.

"We have saved a lot of work and money by using VSIA specs instead of writing our own," said Haverinen.

Similarly, Bob Payne, vice president of system ASIC technology at Philips Electronics, outlined how the company is applying VCI to its reuse structure, which guides the creation of new application platforms or macrocores composed of several application-specific virtual components.

VSIA has rolled with the evolution of the design industry over the past four years, moving from its focus on creating standards for a third-party intellectual property (IP) industry that never materialized to the creation of standards that can be applied by any group looking to integrate virtual components into its design flow.

To further encourage adoption of its standards,VSIA announced the new and improved version of its Deliverables Document. Version 2.3, which went through a heavy edit last winter at ARM Ltd., is said to make it easier for VC vendors to determine whether they are in compliance with VSIA's specifications and are thus more accessible to the outside world.

"We have see n a sharp growth in adoption of VSIA standards as several member companies have created their own internal VC repositories and reuse departments," said Tim O'Donnell, chairman of VSIA.

Support on this point came in a keynote address by Wally Rhines, president and chief executive officer of Mentor Graphics. Rhines showed a chart that depicting how licenses of Mentor's Inventra cores initially took off in 1995 amid hype about the birth of a new third-party intellectual property industry, but flattened over the next five years. However, the chart also showed a sharp growth in Mentor's Quick-Use Reuse Methodology consulting services, which will end 2000 with roughly triple the sales of Mentor Inventra.

"Our Quick-Use Methodology services help customers create VC repositories and methodologies that allow companies to design for reuse," said Rhines.

Rhines keynote, which focused on "reuse without re-verification," indicated how VSIA is expanding its scope to deal with the broader problems of VC use and reuse.

The organization's nine development working groups are currently tackling issues such as system level design, communications and interfaces, verification, signal integrity, and IP protection — much broader than its initial focus on creating standards for the mechanics of a virtual component plug and play architecture.

The newest effort, destined to become VSIA's tenth Development Working Group (DWG), is the VC quality study group.

David Leavins, quality and reliability Manager at Intel Corp.'s Wireless Communications and Computing Group, said the group's charter is to define quality measures and criteria, IP quality "best practices," and possibly to work with the various DWGs to incorporate quality in their specifications.

Leavins said the group is looking at quality in several areas, including VC design authoring, design verification, system level validation, manufacturing, and development process maturity.

The group is also developing an extendible quality attributes spr eadsheet with metrics, similar to OpenMORE, which rates VC reusability based largely on rules in the Synopsys and Mentor co-authored "Reuse Methodology Manual."

The quality group is currently looking for more members. Interested can contact the VSIA directly.

Presentations from the Fall meeting are available on the VSIA Web site.