Global Designer: CSIA employs VSIA standards

The VSIA (Virtual Socket Interface Alliance), a SIP (semiconductor-intellectual-property) standards group focusing on design reuse, and the CSIA (China Semiconductor Industry Association) recently inked a deal in which the CSIA will base its SIP standards on VSIA's standards. This arrangement will let the CSIA develop standards in Chinese, leveraging VSIA standards, which the CSIA will distribute throughout China. "This is a major change for China as it pushes to have standards driven by commercial interest [through a combination of companies and universities] and directly through the government," says Larry Rosenberg, VSIA vice president of engineering. "China wants to have standards that are compatible with the rest of the world."

The organizations will also charter a Chinese VSIA SIG (special-interest group), which provides limited access of VSIA standards to a group of 35 Chinese companies, each with annual revenues of less than $10 million. The group will focus on ways of integrating IP into SOCs (systems on chips) and on IP protection.

A major factor in the CSIA's decision to collaborate with the VSIA and obtain legal rights to create a Chinese derivative of VSIA standards was that the CSIA wanted to change how China acts in IP protection and how the rest of the world perceives the country. Rosenberg notes that officially licensing IP is a significant step toward those goals.

"There is a tremendous amount of sensitivity and interest in doing this," says Rosenberg. "If it wants to be successful in the semiconductor space, it needs access to third-party IP in the West. Otherwise, they are not going to fill fabs. Access to third-party IP is crucial in developing world-class consumer-electronics devices."

China Semiconductor Industry Association, www.csia.net/cn.

Virtual Socket Interface Alliance, www.vsia.org.