VSIA Publicly Releases Updated Hard and Soft IP Tagging Standards; Freescale donates tag reader/writer to VSIA

-- The VSI Alliance (VSIA), the leading IP standards body for the electronics industry, today announced that the organization has updated the Hard IP Tagging Standard (IPP 1 3.0) and Soft IP Tagging Standard (IPP 4 2.0) and will release both documents to the public. In addition, VSIA has received a tag reader/writer donation from Freescale Semiconductor that enables users to quickly find and interpret tags within a design. Both standards and the tag reader/writer are available for download from the VSIA website, www.vsi.org.
 
The VSIA Hard IP and Soft IP Tagging standards are products of the organizations’ IP Protection (IPP) Pillar. These standards allow for designers to retain IP core information throughout the entire design process and ensure proper versions of the core have been integrated into the design.
 
Updates to the Hard IP Tagging Standard include:
Additional required key words for IP_Owner, Techno, Spec Version, Date and Time, and others
The Soft IP Tagging Standard was updated to reflect the Hard IP Tagging updates.
 
“Freescale developed the tag reader/writer for internal use and have found it extremely useful for version control and tracking an IP core throughout the design process,” said Renny Eisele, Director of IP Management at Freescale Semiconductor. “We decided to donate it to VSIA to encourage industry wide adoption of the hard and soft IP tags.”
 
The Tag IP Software (TIPS) donated to VSIA by Freescale enables users to utilize a common user interface to read and write tags into physical designs independent of the EDA tool used.  The text tag information is maintained using an XML schema, easing the user interface and ensures that the tags are correct by construct. TIPS is composed of key components tagengine, gdstag, gift-lite and tips.il. The software is implemented in perl and the complete perl implementation for Linux® kernel and Solaris™ operating system is provided. The Tips.pm perl module is a key building block of the system.
 
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.