VSIA Forms Workgroup to Address Verification IP Quality

—The VSI Alliance (VSIA), the leading IP standards body for the electronics industry, today announced the formation of the verification IP quality workgroup, a subgroup of the IP Quality workgroup which is responsible for the creation of the VSIA Quality IP (QIP) Metric. The group held its first meeting on August 25, 2006 and has since elected Kenneth Larsen, of Mentor Graphics Corporation as the verification IP workgroup chairperson.
 
Industry leading companies including: Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Denali Software, Inc., edacentrum, Freescale Semiconductor, LSI Logic Corporation, Mentor Graphics Corporation, Synopsys, Inc., and UMC have come together to create a verification IP quality worksheet that will address the challenges facing designers as they evaluate and implement standard verification IP components.
 
“As the adoption of the VSIA QIP Metric continues to increase, working to solve IP verification was a natural progression. Designers today face many challenges, and with a standardized mechanism to evaluate Verification IP,  we can minimize the risk and increase design productivity,” said Kenneth Larsen, Director of Marketing Strategy, Mentor Graphics and Verification IP workgroup chairperson, VSIA. “Coordinating efforts between so many influential companies will help increase the value of the Metric through strong industry participation.”
 
About VSIA QIP Metric

The VSIA QIP Metric is a tool that can aggressively reduce the time typically required to make an IP purchase decision and to integrate the core. The Metric helps the IP vendor and IP consumer communicate based on an objective foundation. Besides setting up the basis for measuring a core’s characteristics against an industry-approved list of attributes, the metric provides a view of the IP vendor’s general approach to IP development. This enables a continuous improvement mechanism, and in turn, levels the playing field for vendors and allows an integrator to evaluate similar cores from competing vendors.  The VSIA and FSA have coordinated efforts to develop the hard IP worksheet which will be integrated to the QIP Metric and released to the public by Q107. Following the development of the hard IP and verification IP worksheets, the VSIA has plans to develop software IP and potentially other worksheets to quantitatively evaluate 3rd party IP solutions. VSIA QIP Metric was released to the public in January 2006 and has seen over 1000 unique downloads.
 
About VSIA

The VSI Alliance (VSIA) is an open, international organization that includes representatives from all segments of the SoC industry: System houses, Semiconductor vendors, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies, and Intellectual Property (IP) providers. VSIA’s mission is to dramatically enhance the productivity of the SoC design community by providing leading edge commercial and technical solutions and insight into the development, integration and reuse of IP. VSIA has wide industry participation with more than 70 member companies from around the world. Membership is open to any company with an interest in the development and promotion of business solutions and open standards used in the design of System-on-Chip. For more information, visit the VSIA web site at www.vsi.org, or e-mail to info@vsi.org.