Date yields testimonials and processor cores

Date yields testimonials and processor cores
By Richard Goering and Michael Santarini, EE Times
April 10, 2000 (10:16 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000410S0009

Several companies test-driving standards crafted by the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA) reported success with their projects at the Date 2000 conference in Paris.

At a panel titled "Standards for system-level design: practical reality or a solution in search of a question?" Pete Hardee of CoWare described how his company and Nokia teamed up to implement the entire System Level Interface Standard (SLIF), including the emerging data type standard. SLIF is the product of VSIA's System Level Design development working group, which is working on standards to facilitate the use of cores in system-level design.

At the same panel, Patric Schaumont of the IMEC research consortium and Gjault de Jong of Alcatel also related their respective companies' participation in successful VSIA pilot projects. Schaumont discussed how Alcatel implemented the On Chip Bus Virtual Component Interface specification for a VDSL modem design, while de Jong t old how his group also used the standard to connect a Viterbi decoder into a system-on-chip design.

All three panelists said they were happy with the way the SLIF standards fit into their distinctive methodologies. "Our conclusion from the pilot project was that VSIA specifications support and promote the proper system-level design methodology," said Schaumont.

Though he declined to give details, Hardee said that the CoWare-Nokia project has also been successful. He said implementing the data types in addition to the other SLIF components was fairly straightforward and went quickly.

Elsewhere at Date 2000, Cast Inc. (Pomona, N.Y.) announced the availability of two new cores, the C68000 microprocessor and the PIC 165X RISC microcontroller, both developed by partner Evatronix in Gliwice, Poland. The C68000 core boasts full functional compatibility with the Motorola MC68000 microprocessor. Cast's 16-bit external and 32-bit internal processor serves interrupts and exceptions, and offers a synchronous interface to support MC68000-family peripherals. The PIC165X is an 8-bit microcontroller derived from the Microchip PIC16C5X. It offers a power-saving sleep mode and a watchdog timer function, and its RISC architecture promises fast operation. Further information is at www.cast-inc.com.

Meanwhile, a standards-based program designed to enable real-time Internet transactions for the exchange of virtual components, dubbed QuickVC, was introduced at Date, in a demonstration by Nokia Research Center, the Rapid consortium, Synchronicity, the Silicon Integration Initiative (SI2) and the Virtual Component Exchange.

The effort focuses on the use of XML to tag intellectual-property descriptions, thus allowing a single query to search multiple catalogs. The program attracted some controversy recently when Design and Reuse SA withdrew its participation (see March 20, page 10). QuickVC leverages SI2's QuickData specification, which was developed for co mponent information. The supporting companies are targeting release of formal QuickVC specifications for the Design Automation Conference in June. Further information about QuickData and QuickVC is available at www.si2.org/ecix.

Edited by Richard Goering and Michael Santarini