Standard eases IP tracking for royalty calculations

Standard eases IP tracking for royalty calculations
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
June 26, 2000 (10:23 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000626S0008

The royalty model for silicon intellectual property recently received an ease-of-use-boost as the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance's Intellectual Property Protection Development Working Group (IPP DWG) released its Virtual Component Identification Physical Tagging Standard.

The standard will enable semiconductor foundries and virtual-component providers to track the use of cores and libraries through the fabrication process and to keep records on ownership and the numbers of components used. That should help foundries and virtual-component providers keep better accounting of per-chip royalties.

A tagging format, recorded in the standard GDSII-Stream file, provides complete virtual-component identification information and thus ensures a complete accounting and reporting of the intellectual property used. The VCID standard defines several criteria to ensure an accurate tagging process: required information, or standard definitions for the minimum information needed to ensure complete reporting; an encoding mechanism, which allows for arbitrary keywords and values; and a reporting mechanism, which allows a report for every virtual component on the chip to be produced from the required fields.

VCID is said to specify the coding of information necessary to track ownership of virtual components in any design. It also allows virtual-component users to label the components so foundries can run software that will identify such information as the virtual component's name, company and usage details. The document also defines operational programs to both write and read the information. The standard can tag all of the virtual components used in a single-chip design.

The VCID Standard (IPP 1 1.0) can be accessed and downloaded by VSIA members from www.vsia.org. Nonmember licenses are also available.