25 May 2007
SPIRIT Consortium Accepts Denali’s SystemRDL Donation The SPIRIT Consortium, a global non-profit organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design, has accepted a donation of the SystemRDL format from Denali Software, Inc. This donation signifies a plan by The Consortium to extend the set of deliverables to encompass human-readable data formats. Today, The SPIRIT Consortium provides the IP-XACT specification as a unique way to describe IP meta-data in an XML format for exchange of architectural design data at all points in the front-end design flow. “By accepting the donation of the SystemRDL format into the standards process, The SPIRIT Consortium is making a significant step toward providing richer and more human-readable design-data entry formats,” explained Ralph von Vignau, president of The SPIRIT Consortium. “The specification we create will allow efficient entry of register description data that can be automatically mapped into IP-XACT meta-data for tool-to-tool data exchange, thereby directly improving multi-vendor flow integration.” "There is a natural technology synergy between SystemRDL and IP-XACT. We feel that a new working group will be able to leverage the existing SystemRDL user base and provide significant benefits to The SPIRIT Consortium members in general,” explained Mark Gogolewski, CTO of Denali and Chair of the SystemRDL Alliance. The SPIRIT Consortium works through donation of industrial technologies that are extended, validated, and ratified into multi-vendor standards, which are then delivered to the public by The Consortium. The SystemRDL format is the third major technology donation to The Consortium, with earlier donations being accepted from Mentor Graphics in 2003 for the base schema for IP-XACT and from Synopsys for the inclusion of timing-constraint data into the IP-XACT framework in 2004. Via the SystemRDL, The SPIRIT Consortium will work on producing a standard format to express design intent of registers, including structure, function, and relationships, as well as access semantics. The deliverables from The Consortium will be engineered to ensure consistency between the human-readable register formats and the IP-XACT meta-data specification for multi-vendor flow and IP integration. MIPS Technologies, along with representatives from Denali, LSI Corporation and NXP, will lead the effort. For more information on The SPIRIT Consortium go to: www.spiritconsortium.org. | 
