Anaheim, Calif. -The newly minted Spirit Consortium of chip makers and design tool suppliers, formed to make intellectual-property (IP) metadata easily transferrable, described its goals during its official launch here last week at the Design Automation Conference.

The consortium will develop two standards, said Ralph von Vignau, director of the platform infrastructure department at Philips Semiconductors and chairman of Spirit (which loosely stands for "structure for packaging, integrating and reusing IP within tool flows"). One will provide a metadata description in XML code that will capture all IP design, test and integration information needed to transfer and exchange IP among companies, freeing users from the time-consuming task of characterizing the IP to fit their design flows. The second will be an application programming interface that will let companies integrate the Spirit IP descriptions into the commercial and in-house tools of EDA vendors and semiconductor designers.

No standard format now exists that contains all the metadata needed to integrate IP quickly into design flows, von Vignau said. "We spend a great deal of time, man-months, trying to get third-party IP to work with our current tool sets or our own IP to work with different EDA tool suites. This consortium will address these issues."

First word of the consortium was tipped last week by the EE Times Network (see www.eedesign.com/story/OEG20030523S0036).

Von Vignau dismissed comparisons between the Spirit Consortium and the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance, an industry association whose own officials recently admitted the group's inability to achieve many practical goals since its formation in the late 1990s to create IP reuse standards. Membership in the Spirit Consortium is open to all interested parties, von Vignau said. Members will have a voice in the creation of the standards and will have access to the IP format and API after they are finished, he said, although the consortium's founding members will have the final say on the standards.

Those founding members are ARM Ltd., Beach Solutions Ltd., Cadence Design Systems Inc., Mentor Graphics Corp., Royal Philips Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys Inc.

Synopsys said it hopes to see the consortium make quick progress. "This is not a consortium that Synopsys wants to be on five years from now," said Joachim Kunkel, vice president of marketing for Synopsys IP and design services. "We want to see this standard completed very quickly and not drag on too long."

Rare consensus

Disagreement among the EDA industry's three leading players often complicates standard-setting processes. But Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor are all founding members of the Spirit Consortium, and each has stated that it doesn't expect a fight on this front.

Many design tool vendors already have their own IP encapsulation formats and tools, but von Vignau said those tools don't talk to one another.

Beach and Mentor already have donated their respective XML formats to the consortium, which has assigned a working group to evaluate each and perhaps meld the two to create the final standard.

The standard descriptions will embody such information about IP blocks as clocks, signals and test strategies, and the formatted data will accompany or be embedded in IP blocks.

A separate working group will pursue an API that would let EDA tools be adjusted to accept the consortium's XML-based format. The group expects to complete its review of proposals by year's end and to begin work on the standard early next year.

"I think the IP vendors will gain the most from this standard," said von Vignau. "It means they only have to create one instead of many files for each core they offer."

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