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VSIA RIP: IP consortium winds down operations
Industry organization will transfer its accomplishments and ongoing projects, including QIP Metric and IP Encryption, to other groups.
By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor -- EDN, 7/9/2007
The VSIA (Virtual Socket Interface Alliance) a consortium of semiconductor intellectual-property (IP) developers and users, has voted to cease operations, organization president Kathy Werner announced today. The VSIA board will continue to function as a caretaker long enough to oversee the transfer of the organization's projects to other organizations.
"The board feels that this is the best thing for the industry and for the work we have done," Werner said. "VSIA has pioneered a number of important tools for the IP industry. But there are, if anything, too many industry organizations, and a number of companies, working on the challenges of IP now. It will be most efficient for everyone, and most effective in disseminating our results, to transfer the work to other existing organizations."
Accordingly, the various VSIA working groups will complete the process of packaging their results for transfer and then will cease meeting. The board, which is already in tentative discussions with a number of industry organizations including the IEEE, will oversee the transfer process to ensure that the work moves forward.
The organization will identify individual experts from the VSIA working groups who can seed the organizations to whom the work will be transferred, so that vital understanding and contacts will not be lost, Werner said. Since many of these individuals are already active in other industry organizations—such as the IEEE, the SPIRIT Consortium or SI2—that might pick up some of the VSIA projects, the transfer should be relatively seamless. The VSIA Web site, which provides downloads of the organizations external documents, will continue to operate, supported by LSI Corp. A library of internal documents and papers will be maintained as well, as a source for future development and research.
The organization will disband leaving some very significant achievements. The best-known is probably the QIP Metric, a quantitative tool for evaluating the level of development of an item of semiconductor IP, estimating its fit to a proposed application, and identifying the critical issues that should be discussed between the IP vendor and the user. The QIP Metric has enjoyed wide dissemination via the VSIA Web site and has found use with a wide variety of IP vendors and users. It has also served as the basis of internal tools in a number of design shops, as well as public tools from other industry organizations.
Other key VSIA projects involve the transfer of IP between organizations. One is the IP Encryption program, currently at the level where it is ready to be moved to another organization for implementation. The encryption effort is aimed at a standard that would make IP readable only to the tools that operate on it, but render the underlying IP design invisible to the licensee, thus protecting the underlying design work from theft or inadvertent loss. A related program on IP watermarking, which would make it possible to identify the source of semiconductor IP by examining the patterns on a die, is still at the theoretical level, according to Werner, but has also made progress.
"There are still very significant issues to be address in the use of IP," Werner said. "In particular, the transfer process—the way specific information moves from provider to user—is still being worked out. Today it can involve a tangle of different file formats and deliverables. Also, evaluation and transfer of the hardware-dependent software that enables the semiconductor IP to function has not yet been addressed." Werner hopes that moving the work that the VSIA has done into other organizations will accelerate progress in these areas.
One region in which the VSIA's work will certainly go forward is China. "China has a distinct interest in the QIP Metric in particular," Werner explained. In the US and Europe, developers have seen QIP as a measuring tool and a means of focusing discussions between vendors and integrators, Werner said. But some developers and officials in China would like to see QIP evolve into more of a cookbook for selecting and reusing IP, perhaps functioning within a state agency for IP distribution. This will likely lead to further development based on the QIP Metric in China, but in a quite different direction that that taken in the US.
After its stewardship roll in transferring VSIA's work to others is complete, the board will cease to meet, according to Werner. But as a network of individuals, rather than a formal board, the members of the VSIA team will likely remain an important source of experience and vision for IP development and reuse. "It's a very small industry that way," Werner said.
