EDA Tech Forum

Ralph von Vignau and Christopher K. Lennard provide an update on the fast-moving and widely-supported IP integration initiative.

Introduction

Complete system-on-chip (SoC) design assembly, configuration and verification environments emerged in the 1990s to address an increasing design gap between the capacity of silicon and the ability of engineering teams to fill that gap meaningfully with optimized system designs. Despite the need being addressed by these early environments, adoption was slow.

In this context, two major obstacles were apparent. There was no standard environment-neutral description for design intellectual property (IP) that enabled its rapid re-use in a variety of tools; and it was difficult to exchange SoC architectural data between design tools in a multi-vendor design-flow.

The SPIRIT Consortium, launched at the 2003 Design Automation Conference (DAC), was formed to resolve the needs of an integrated front-end multi-vendor system design flow. Deployment of the early specifications from the consortium into EDA tools and IP has been very successful, providing recognized time-to-market (TTM) benefits for system-design houses. Building on this success, SPIRIT is looking to make an even greater contribution to the industry over the near future.