Alliance to help validate IP quality

Atrenta has joined the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA), the SoC, IP and reuse standards group driving system chip productivity.

Atrenta has joined the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA), the SoC, IP and reuse standards group driving system chip productivity.

Atrenta is partnering with VSIA's Quality IP (QIP) development working group to implement and automate the QIP rules, guidelines and documentation in Atrenta's award-winning SpyGlass predictive analyser product.

This will enable ASIC and SoC designers to perform in-depth structural analysis on Verilog and VHDL register transfer level (RTL) descriptions as well as assess the quality of the IP and ensure compliance with best practices and IP reuse guidelines based on the QIP rules.

Additionally, IP providers will be able to use SpyGlass to quickly create QIP compliant IP and IP integrators will be able to use SpyGlass to quickly verify the incoming IP for QIP compliance.

"It is imperative that there be a standard quality assurance process that measures and evaluates the quality of silicon IP against a checklist of critical issues", said Bill Billowitch, IP Design Reuse and Development Manager at Agere Systems and a VSIA board member.

"We are very pleased that Atrenta has joined VSIA in order to work towards building the QIP rules directly into the SpyGlass product, thereby providing an automated way for QIP compliance checking.

This is a major step in VSIA's efforts to bring the best design techniques in the industry to the design community worldwide".

"The importance of the IP Quality development working group is demonstrated by leaders such as Atrenta who are joining VSIA to both influence and implement the QIP metric", said Michael Kaskowitz, VSIA President.

"We believe that Atrenta's market leadership and technical expertise will benefit our membership base and we look forward to working with them".

"There has been a growing need for an industry standard to ensure high-quality IP and common metrics that both the IP provider and the IP integrator can use", stated John Rizzo, Vice President of Marketing at Atrenta.

"VSIA has developed QIP to address this issue, but until now this standard has been only a written document with no method to automatically check compliance.

Atrenta will now automate this checklist and provide in-depth diagnostics during RTL development to help both the IP providers and IP integrators to meet requirements quickly and easily".

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