With all talk at this week’s Design Automation Show in San Francisco centered around system-on-chip integration, Mentor Graphics Corp chose the show to announce major SOC partnerships with IBM Corp, Motorola Inc and United Microelectronics Corp. Mentor’s contracts division will help Motorola with a multi-year system-on-chip development program that aims to enable Motorola to re-use its standard and application specific IC design modules and package them into products. Motorola says its program will encompass the sourcing, access and distribution of its IP intellectual property modules, and will use a standards-based methodology so that IP modules can be reused without any modifications needed. IBM Corp’s Microelectronics division is to license Mentor’s IP Virtual Library of re-usable soft cores as part of its Blue Logic library (CI No 3,249), for the development of system-on-chip designs for its ASIC application specific integrated circuit customers. And the UMC Group, the Taiwanese foundry conglomerate, has also gone to Mentor for IP building blocks and methodologies for system-on-chip work currently in production, and for future 0.18 micron process technology due to come to market next year. At the show, Mentor added further elements of its IP design methodology and announced support for the ASIC Council’s OLA Open Library API for IP modules. Meanwhile UMC, along with Intel Corp and Seagate Technology Inc, joined the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance, a 180-strong group working to define system-on-chip standards. As expected, the VSI Alliance issued its data representation specifications for virtual component interchange (CI No 3,427).
