"The Spirit 1.0 proposal is in member review to validate it against real-world SoC designs and design flows," said Chris Lennard, Spirit Consortium vice chairman and ARM System-Design Program Manager. "This review will help ensure proven industry support of the Spirit standard when it is publicly released in Q4 2004."

Lennard went on to tell a panel audience at this year's Design Automation Conference that version 1.0 of the standard is aimed at the register-transfer-level of design but that there are already plans for version 2.0 to be ready for review in Q1 2005 and to be ready for use in Q3 2005. That version would extend the specification to cover interoperability between tools and to support system-level design and verification. Lennard also revealed that another 15 companies have joined Beach Solutions as "reviewing members" standing behind the other six as steering committee members.

The Spirit Consortium was launched one year ago at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2003 by Beach Solutions Ltd. along with Philips Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics, ARM Holdings plc, Cadence Design Systems Inc., Mentor Graphics Corp. and Synopsys Inc., with the aim of ensuring circuit intellectual property (IP) cores could be more easily transferred between IP vendors, EDA companies, semiconductor and systems companies.

The new members are: Aptix, CoWare, Denali Software Inc., Design & ReUse, Giga Scale IC, HCL Technologies, IPextreme, Novas Software Inc., Prosilog, Sonics, Summit Design, Synchronicity, VCX Software, Ltd., Verisity and Timing Tool.

After an outline of the scope of the draft standard, the panel was opened for questions and started with one about whether Spirit would hand off its work to a formal standards body.

Ralph von Vignau, consortium chairman and director of technology and standards within Philips Semiconductors, said that Spirit was intended to be a lean and fast moving organization with a finite life. It was expected to get a standard written, iterate it a couple of times and then hand it off for ratification and maintenance while Spirit would be wound down. Von Vignau said he had opened some preliminary discussions with the IEEE as a possible repository for Spirit standards.

It was also pointed out by two panelists, John Wilson of Mentor Graphics Corp. and Joachim Kunkel of Synopsys Inc., that demonstrations of Spirit-compliant tools working with Spirit-compliant intellectual property could be found on the DAC exhibition floor.

Mentor's Platform Express automatically building and simulating designs that include IP from ARM, ST and Philips and Mentor, documented with the Spirit XML standard.

Synopsys was planning to demonstrate how to assemble, verify, and implement a subsystem with Spirit-compliant IP and Synopsys' coreAssembler tool. The subsystem includes the ARM ARM926EJS, an on-chip AHB memory block from ST and an AHB subsystem from Philips as well as Synopsys' DesignWare USB 2.0 Host Controller.

Victor Berman of Cadence Design Systems Inc. was a no-show on the panel, but Cadence was slated to be showing how blocks of Spirit-compliant IP can be imported into the CoWare/Cadence integrated tool flow to build a design platform and then simulate and verify the platform. Questions came from the audience on how much additional work Spirit-compliant IP required. The answer came that for virgin blocks the effort is considerable, although help was expected to arrive with schema-filing tools.

Chris Lennard said that importing an ARM Primecell peripheral cell takes about half a day. "The more configurable the IP is, the more work there is and verification," said John Goodenough, also of ARM, before saying that there is probably a rule of thumb based on the thickness of the design book associated with a particular block.

Another audience member expressed some dismay that tool interoperability appeared to be left to "proof by example rather than a full round of interoperability testing" prior to deployment. Lennard and von Vignau sought to persuade the questioner that if enough proofs by example were run, confidence could be built in Spirit-compliant tools and the standard itself.

By: DocMemory
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