Formed in 1996 with a mission to dramatically enhance the productivity of the SoC design community by providing leading-edge commercial and technical solutions and insight into the development, integration and reuse of IP.
The group was initially formed by Toshiba and cadence and quickly followed by Mentor and Fujitsu. The first formal meeting in September 1996 was attended by 35 companies including EDA, systems houses and semiconductor companies. By March 1997, membership had grown to over 100 members and at their peak they had over 200 members.
Perhaps the biggest problem facing VSIA was that they never considered the vastness of the scope of the problem they were undertaking and only learned this as they progressed through the problem space. It was not until the 2001/2003 timeframe when they started to address the importance of software, neither had they ever really got their arms around the notion of verification reuse.
What they did have success with was the creation of the notion that IP could be created and packaged in a standardized manner and would connect to the rest of the system through a ‘virtual socket’.
In 2001 Mentor Graphics and Synopsys transitioned the Open Measure of Reuse Excellence (OpenMORE) program to the VSIA’s Quality and Compliance Initiatives group. The goal of the OpenMORE assessment program was to provide a mature quality measure for the best design-reuse practices for IP.
IP integration culminated in the launch of the Quality IP Metric (QIP). QIP included metrics for soft, hard, and verification IP. It also included a vendor qualification metric.
In Q4 2006 VSIA formed the IP Encryption working group, a sub-group of the VSIA IP Protection Pillar, to develop a non-proprietary methodology that would enable IP vendors to create a single version of the encrypted data that can be used by tools from multiple EDA vendors.
Closed in July 2007. Much of the work was transferred to other consortia and standards bodies.
The following book contains taxonomies that were developed within RASSP and VSIA and updated by the editors.
Taxonomies for the Development and Verification of Digital Systems
