SPIRIT Consortium drives IP re-use and interoperability with release of specification

Demonstrations by leading IP and EDA vendors at Design Automation Conference

DESIGN AUTOMATION CONFERENCE, SAN DIEGO, Calif., June 8th, 2004 - True to its promise to have a proposed standard within one year, the SPIRIT (Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-using IP within Tool-flows) Consortium today announced that it has released a proposed SPIRIT 1.0 standard to the SPIRIT membership for review. After a period to extensively validate the proposal, Version 1.0 is expected to be approved for public release in early fourth quarter 2004 and provide a standard to support multiple industrial tool-flows and intellectual property (IP) libraries. Several EDA and IP companies will be demonstrating their tools actively handling SPIRIT-compliant IP from multiple vendors at this year’s DAC (June 7-11, 2004 San Diego, CA, USA).

“Thanks to the tremendous effort put in by the Consortium’s founding companies, we now have a proposed specification for review that will allow members to encapsulate IP blocks and share them with each other to validate interoperability of IP libraries and multiple tool sets,” said Ralph von Vignau, Consortium Chairman and Director Technology & Standards of Philips Semiconductors Chief Technology Office – Reuse Technology Group.

The proposed SPIRIT 1.0 specification provides a complete solution for RT-level System-on-Chip (SoC) design encapsulation to enable automated IP integration, as well as interoperability of configurable and non-configurable IP with multiple tool sets. By enabling a standard machine and human readable description of IP block structure and general attributes in XML (eXtensible Markup Language), SPIRIT-compliant IP will be able to flow smoothly into EDA tools that support the SPIRIT format, such as system design, co-verification, simulation and synthesis tools.

"The SPIRIT 1.0 proposal is in member review to validate it against real-world SoC designs and design flows," said Chris Lennard, SPIRIT Consortium vice chairman and ARM System-Design Program Manager. "This review will help ensure proven industry support of the SPIRIT standard when it is publicly released in Q4 2004."

Having achieved a major milestone towards an approved SPIRIT 1.0 standard, the consortium today sets itself a new target – to release a SPIRIT 2.0 (Version 2) standard, which extends the specification to cover interoperability between tools and extends the technical scope to explicitly support Electronic System Level (ESL) and Verification. This will include, for example, the ability to launch application-specific tasks operating on SPIRIT formats from within different EDA tools. It will also enable provision of configurable IP for automated ESL design, assembly, verification and simulation.

The excitement that this interoperability initiative has created in the industry has already prompted a number of new companies to join the consortium, bringing the total membership to more than 22 of the leading IP and EDA companies, including:
Aptix, Beach Solutions, CoWare, Denali Software Inc., Design & ReUse, Giga Scale IC, HCL Technologies, IPextreme, Novas Software Inc., Prosilog, Sonics, Summit Design, Synchronicity, VCX Software, Ltd., Verisity and Timing Tool.

SPIRIT Demonstrations at DAC
Demonstrations of SPIRIT and information on SPIRIT-based products and services can be found at the following Booths at DAC 2004.

Cadence # 2441: Cadence will be showing how blocks of SPIRIT-compliant IP can be imported into the CoWare/Cadence integrated tool flow to build a design platform and then simulate and verify the platform.

Mentor Graphics # 626: Mentor Graphics® will demonstrate Platform Express™ automatically building and simulating designs that include IP from ARM, ST and Philips and Mentor, documented with the SPIRIT XML standard.

Synopsys #4825: Synopsys will demonstrate how to quickly assemble, verify, and implement a subsystem with SPIRIT-compliant IP and Synopsys’ coreAssembler™ tool. The subsystem includes the ARM ARM926EJS, an on-chip AHB memory block from ST and an AHB subsystem from Philips as well as Synopsys’ DesignWare® USB 2.0 Host Controller.

About SPIRIT
The Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-using IP within Tool-flows (SPIRIT) consortium was created to develop a standard for more efficient integration of IP in System-on-Chip (SoC) platform design in two areas: IP meta-data description and a tool integration API. The consortium is comprised of leading EDA, IP and system and semiconductor companies, including ARM, Cadence Design Systems Inc., Mentor Graphics, Royal Philips Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys, Inc. For more information or to become a member of SPIRIT visit www.spiritconsortium.com