IP standards pioneers VSIA closing doors: so long and thanks

Hey Folks, our executive editor Ron Wilson just posted an article that after 10 years of existence, the VSIA (Virtual Socket Initiative Alliance) is closing down, with many of its standards efforts apparently moving to other standards organizations.

I have to say the news is not a huge a surprise, as over its history, the VSIA had struggled to produce standards in a timely manner that could be widely adopted in the market. The group had its first major setback when it failed to produce a viable on-chip bus standard in a timely manner. After years of delays in bringing out the OCB, vendors like ARM and Sonics produced their own versions that were more viable. When VSIA finally did produce the OCB it was too generalized and thus not as efficient as proprietary buses. After that, faith in the organization started to flounder and the VSIA struggled to gain broad acceptance for its subsequent standards efforts, including the Quality IP Metric and experienced similar delays in bringing out standards for IP encryption and watermarking.

That said, we must all acknowledge and thank the many VSIA organizers, working groups and volunteers for laying the groundwork and taxonomy of the IP industry. The VSIA was very successful in creating terminology for the new industry and identifying the issues that the electronics industry would face in moving to IP based design, which became SoC design. While it may have been unsuccessful in addressing all the issues, it certainly helped identify the challenges so that individual companies could address them. Indeed today, it is hard to find an advanced IC design that doesn’t have several IP blocks or employ some amount of design reuse.

It’s interesting to note that the IP industry, thanks in part to the VSIA, has even succeeded in introducing a new phrase—“Multi-core processing”–to the mainstream English lexicon.

But the folding of the VSIA also raises some interesting questions: Have all the big challenges for IP-based design been addressed adequately? Has enough work been done to make the IP industry reach its true potential? Is there an IP industry now? Are proprietary standards good enough? If not, who will identify and hopefully address IP issues? I guess, we’ll see…