The SPIRIT Consortium Sends IP-XACT Specification to IEEE

SAN JOSE, June 12, 2006 – The SPIRIT Consortium, a global organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design, today announced that it is to contribute the current version of its system-on-chip meta-data specification, v1.2, to the IEEE for consideration as an industry standard.  This technical specification, to be known as the IP-XACT design-exchange format, comprehensively addresses support for the integrated multi-vendor RTL design and verification flow. The nomenclatured P1685 IEEE-SA working group is focused on building industry adoption and ratifying an open industry meta-data standard for IP providers, EDA vendors, and independent design manufacturers to help build real marketplace benefit for efficient design tool and IP integration.  

The IP-XACT specification describes a meta-data schema for the description of intellectual property (IP) and an application programming interface (API) to provide tool access to this schema.  This schema provides a standard method to describe IP to make it compatible with automated integration techniques.  Tools that implement this standard will be able to automatically interpret, configure, integrate, and manipulate IP blocks delivered with meta-data that conforms to the proposed IP meta-data description, and the IP-XACT APIs will provide a standard method for linking multiple tools together through a single exchange meta-data format.  This automatic integration of tools and IP from multiple vendors creates an IP-XACT Enabled environment. The proposed IEEE standards process will commence work on the current IP-XACT deliverables from The SPIRIT Consortium and will complete following a further technology contribution from The Consortium covering transaction-level modeling extensions.

“The SPIRIT Consortium provides multi-vendor design-flow integration requirements that help ensure efficiency and rapid adoption of standard specifications,” said Gary Delp, technical director of The SPIRIT Consortium.  “As The SPIRIT Consortium specifications are adopted, integrated device manufacturers will benefit from faster time-to-market and IP integration by making their design-flows IP-XACT enabled.”

The SPIRIT Consortium specifications document hardware and software views of a design.  They document the interface on an IP, including identification of ad-hoc connections, interfaces to standard buses, and custom buses.  This allows system design and verification tools processing the IP to automatically recognize the integration requirements.  They also document the views of the design, as well as register and memory-map information.

About IP-XACT

IP-XACT provides support of verification IP and interfaces (e.g., monitors), configurability data exchange, explicit hierarchy support, and APIs for exchange of design meta-data.  Specifically, the IP-XACT proposed standard today is comprised of the following characteristics:

• full support of RTL design, including any component type, hardware description language (HDL), configuration or connection-type at this level of abstraction
• a set of architectural rules that define constraints and guide the connectivity and usage of each IP in a given platform
• a set of bus definitions that describe the meaningful signal names of each bus type so that it can be connected to compatible IP
• a mechanism to define any bus structure in terms of signal names that can be used for hooking up other IP
• a structure for describing the instantiation and connectivity of components or component models within a design
• methods for defining register information, memory maps and address spaces
• a way of separating platform-specific meta-data required for a piece of IP that may not be part of the generic IP definition
• a way of specifying configuration options for a piece of IP and enabling the selection of these options
• provides a mechanism to enable associations between configurable elements of a design to be specified and handled
• a way of storing persistent data that supports the iterative process of user configurations and the options used to derive them
• a basic interface to enable configuration and generation scripts
• a mechanism for adding implementation constraints to descriptions of IP to aid in the flow to synthesis

Extensions to the base of IP-XACT are being developed in The SPIRIT Consortium today to address system-level design and transactional verification.  These extensions will be included in the IP-XACT v1.4 specification to be delivered into the P1685 IEEE standards process towards the end of 2006.

About the Consortium
The SPIRIT Consortium is a global organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design.  It is comprised of companies dedicated to the adoption of a unified set of specifications for configuring, integrating, and verifying IP in advanced SoC design tool sets.  The Consortium is comprised of leading EDA, IP, system integration, and semiconductor companies.   For more information on The SPIRIT Consortium and its goals, please visit www.spiritconsortium.org.