The SPIRIT Consortium approves IP-XACT v1.5

NAPA, USA: The SPIRIT Consortium™, a global non-profit organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design, has approved version 1.5 of its IP-XACT™ specification for handoff to the IEEE P1685 working group.

The IP-XACT specification provides a machine readable XML structure for IP modules and systems databooks. The XML data documents many different aspects of electronic design elements, enabling designers using IP-XACT tools to automatically create many different expressions of a design in a consistent and correlated way.

Design and verification engineers will benefit from using this specification through the automation testbench creation and exploration.

IP-XACT 1.5 will be handed off to the IEEE Standards Association for consideration as an industry standard. This technical specification, known as the IP-XACT design-exchange format, comprehensively addresses support for integrated multi-vendor ESL and RTL design and verification flows.

The P1685 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 SPIRIT Consortium gratefully acknowledges the efforts of its Technical Working Groups for their extensive and dedicated work in bringing the specification to readiness for handoff to the IEEE-SA," said Ralph von Vignau, president of The SPIRIT Consortium. "As The SPIRIT Consortium specifications are adopted, integrated device manufacturers will benefit from faster time-to-market and ease of IP integration by making their design flows IP-XACT-enabled."

Building on the IP-XACT 1.4 specification, this next version of IP-XACT extends the IP-XACT data model to more complete description of the register data and address maps. Several small changes have been made to the schema based on the testing and feedback from the 1.4 release.

As always, the Consortium has provided automated transforms to use IP-XACT data written to previous versions. IP-XACT 1.5 is specifically targeted for hand-off to the IEEE P1685 working group for IEEE standardization. The version released to the IEEE is publicly available for informational purposes.

EDA standards organizations Accellera and The SPIRIT Consortium to merge

NAPA, USA: Two leading Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry organizations, Accellera and The SPIRIT Consortium, announced today that the organizations’ Boards have agreed to a merger of the two entities. The union improves the development of language-based and IP standards.

Accellera is the leading standards organization developing language-based standards used by system, semiconductor, IP and EDA companies. The SPIRIT Consortium is the leading standards organization focused on developing standards for IP deployment and reuse.

"Within our organizations there are several areas where we are very complementary and close cooperation will be beneficial. Both organizations are aligned on the path to formal standards through the IEEE," remarked Ralph von Vignau, President of The SPIRIT Consortium. "With this merger we can use our resources, both human and infrastructure, more effectively to develop and deploy industry-driven standards."

"Our plans to merge benefit the worldwide electronic design community by combining our visions and leveraging our operational strengths in developing and delivering EDA and IP standards," added Shrenik Mehta, Accellera Chair. "The merged organization with its broad and diverse participation base is well positioned to develop future standards that meet the needs of the industry."

The merged organization will be called Accellera and The SPIRIT Consortium name will continue to be associated with the organization’s ongoing IP standardization efforts. The merged organizations will work towards a greater cooperation with other standardization groups in the industry.

Further details of the merger will be announced at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco, the week of July 27, 2009.

The two organizations currently have eight standardization subcommittees operating. These standards include: SystemRDL (Register Description Language), IPtagging, Interface Technical Committee (ITC), Open Verification Library (OVL), Unified Coverage Interoperability (UCI), Verilog Analog/Mixed Signal (AMS), Verification IP (VIP) and IP-XACT.