September 17, 2007 -- A recent note in the electronics industry press about a proposal to create an IP Industry Association (IIA) struck me as slightly ironic in light of the shutdown of the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA) earlier this year. Of course, the VSIA concentrated on IP-related technical standards and did not carry out other activities typical of a trade association, such as legal, governmental, general publicity, lobbying, or conducting trade shows. And in fact, more than once in its ten-year lifespan, I felt that VSIA should declare victory and go home, in that its primary goals had been accomplished. When it finally did pack up its suitcases this summer, I think it could have been much more explicit in its declaration of victory.

Despite the critics (and there were many in the decade of VSIA), the organization accomplished a lot in defining standards and concepts relevant to the development of IP reuse, the IP industry, and designers' abilities to create and reuse IP whether sourced by their colleagues in the next cube or by a third-party company a world away. The fact that many other organizations arose to deal with many other aspects of IP, and that people are today suggesting a new industry organization, and having a vigorous debate about the current and future prospects for IP, is in no small way a recognition that IP reuse is a real and viable proposition and that VSIA in many ways helped foster this development. Here I must mention that I was a fairly early participant in VSIA activities, especially as they touched on system-level design/ ESL, so I do have a bias on this issue! At the same time, I'll try to be as balanced and analytical as my biases let me.

One way of measuring the impact of VSIA is to look at its many children – those activities, standards, and specifications that were created under its auspices that live on in other forms – sometimes explicitly acknowledged, sometimes just implicit. Many of these are important in the ESL domain. Often, the same people did work for several related organizations, acting as transmission belts for the ideas. Sometimes, the influence happened even if it was denied at the time by major participants (standards wars have a habit of being very partisan!). Those children of VSIA that come to mind include:

The System Level Interface Format (SLIF) work arguably lives on in some of the work OSCI has been doing in TLM (Transaction Level Modelling). The Virtual Component Interface (VCI) work lives on in some of the OCP-IP work (and OCP-IP credits VCI as an important input at its web site). The VSIA model taxonomy, itself based on work done by RASSP, as well as its work on hardware-dependent software, functional verification, and platform-based design taxonomies, lives on it a book edited by Brian Bailey, myself, and Tom Anderson. We did this to ensure that this collective work, to which more than 100 people contributed over the years, would remain accessible to users in the future. The book “Taxonomies for the Development and Verification of Digital Systems” is available from Springer. The VSIA IP quality metric work has been donated to the IEEE DASC (Design Automation Standards Committee) for possible future standardization. And it collaborated with the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) on hard IP quality metrics for a number of years, so the FSA Hard IP Quality work can be counted as a child (or at least a relative) of the VSIA work. The VSIA IP encryption and IP tagging work has also been donated to the IEEE DASC for possible future standardization. The original VSIA architecture documents and concepts for virtual components influenced many companies in their own preparation of standards for IP reuse and exchange. For example, Motorola Semiconductor (now Freescale) introduced its Semiconductor Reuse Standards (SRS) around the year 2000, which had been influenced by the VSIA original work, as well as Motorola internal practices and guidelines. The SRS standards can still be downloaded from the Freescale web site. Some of the VSIA IP Transport work was adopted by Chip Estimate and Design and Reuse. China adopted VSIA standards as the basis for its own Silicon Intellectual property standards.

No doubt, many more examples could be found. One interesting one in some ways is the organization called SPIRIT, which decided early on to be unaffiliated with VSIA because it sought to find a quicker and more effective means to draw up standards for IP meta-data, and to see their adoption in tools and real flows. It may still be too early to judge whether SPIRIT has found an effective model, but its emphasis on real flows and real users was apparent at its DAC 2007 meeting. (If life was an episode of the comedy “Seinfeld”, perhaps SPIRIT would be the “Bizarro-VSIA”).

With this rich heritage of use and reuse, influence and some adoption, I think it's reasonable to conclude that VSIA had a real impact on the electronics design industry. In Shakespeare' Julius Caesar, Antony says: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him; The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.” My version would say: “I come to praise VSIA, not to bury it; The good that it did lives after it; hey, what evil does a standards organization ever do?”

By Grant Martin, Chief Scientist, Tensilica, Inc.

Before joining Tensilica as Chief Scientist, Grant worked for Cadence Design Systems for 9 years, eventually becoming a Cadence Fellow in its Labs; Nortel/BNR in Canada for 10 years; and Burroughs in Scotland for 6 years. He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mathematics (Combinatorics and Optimization) from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1977 and 1978.

Grant is a co-author or co-editor of nine books dealing with SOC design, SystemC, UML, modeling, EDA for integrated circuits and system-level design, including the first book on SOC design published in Russian. His most recent book, “ESL Design and Verification”, written with Brian Bailey and Andrew Piziali, was published by Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann in February, 2007.