A new open consortium of 36 electronics companies was formed yesterday to push standards for the system-chip industry, to foster a greater level of mix and match components from multiple vendors, in the form of system-level macros, cores or megacells. The Virtual Socket Interface Alliance includes semiconductor vendors, systems companies, ASIC providers and electronic design companies, and the aim is to make it easier to integrate IP – intellectual property – blocks of functionality germane to a particular company into core system chip designs. Initiated by Cadence Design Systems Inc, other members include Advanced RISC Machines, Cirrus Logic Corp, Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi, Mentor Graphics, Silicon Graphics Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc, Sony Corp, Texas Instruments, Toshiba Corp and VLSI. The Alliance was also endorsed by RAPID – the Reusable Application-specific Intellectual Property Developers association, formed back in June by a group of Intellectual Property developers. The baseline VSI standards proposals, to be hammered out by multiple working groups and then submitted to a core standards team, should provide common interface standards for component designers and builders to work to, so that IP in standardized virtual component forms can be rapidly mixed and matched into systems chips. Common interface standards will allow virtual components to be fitted quickly into virtual sockets at both the functional level (eg. interface protocols) and the physical level (eg. clock, test and power structures). Within a few years, says the Alliance, systems chip designers will be able to access a web-based network to identify component sources, evaluate alternatives and purchase design-in data. As part of its activity the group will examine ways of combining logic, peripherals and memory on a single chip, something that still eludes designers. According to Dataquest analyst Gary Smith, the system-on-a-chip business is being held back from the volume market by the lack of standards. IPs from four different sources might be required to support a system chip design for a set-top box, for instance. Others are not so sure of the Alliance’s value. LSI Logic, the most obvious omission from the membership list, says it is still considering its position: it has done extensive work building up its own set of libraries. Details are promised on the Web from www.ip.net.org – though the site wasn’t operational as we went to press.
