Standards dance

摘要

The System on Chip (SoC) business has been growing steadily, though not spectacularly, for the last decade. Higher expectations of growth in IP use and reuse have stimulated continuous efforts to remove the so called 'barriers' to SoC design and there seem to be many. Since the early days there have been business barriers as no-one knew how to trade IP and everyone was paranoid about security and protection (ongoing). Quality issues arose with the influx of start up companies. Then there was the lack of eda tool interoperability, the design for test problems, methodology issues and most recently the verification bottleneck. In practically every case, a key contributing factor to these barriers is cited as lack of acceptable standards. In fact standards activity in the SoC arena has been high.