Under the agreement, OCP-IP will chair the VSIA on-chip bus design working group, and will gain a seat on the VSIA technical committee. OCP-IP will also form an adoption group — a committee that will drive commercial adoption of the standard — to promote the OCP-IP and VSIA standards on interconnect.

VSIA said in a statement it now endorses the OCP standard socket — a definition of the interface between a functional block and an interconnect fabric in one type of system-level IC architecture — as a standard socket in VSIA's scheme of interconnect standards.

The OCP organization will then take over control and maintenance of VSIA's VCI Bus Interface Standard and Bus Attributes Specification, which together defined the terms and specified a standard format for establishing connections between blocks and busses.

The OCP-IP was formed by a group of companies to promote the OCP specification — a key element in the Sonics Inc. interconnect scheme — as an industry standard. It has been driven largely by major SoC players Nokia, Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics, and is heavily supported by Sonics.

But the cooperation should not be seen as a Sonics appropriation of the VSIA process, according to spokesmen for the two organizations. Rather, by combining VSIA's groundwork in definitions, requirements and specification with the specific implementation offered by OCP-IP, the move gives SoC developers a VSIA-compliant, readily available socket they can use now.

Larry Cooke, VSIA's vice president of marketing, said other bus interface architectures, such as those from ARM and IBM Microelectronics, could also be brought into the VSIA formalism, and they could have their own adoption groups.