The SPIRIT Consortium is a group of vendors and users of electronic design automation

Electronic design automation

Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuits...

 (EDA) tools, defining standards for the exchange of SoC

SOC

SOC or SoC may refer to:Social Networking / Entertainment* Soc.TV, an internet based, social television network* Soldier of ChristBusiness* Sirte Oil Company* South Oil CompanyScience and technology...

 design information. The standards defined so far are IP-XACT

IP-XACT

IP-XACT is an XML format that defines and describes electronic components and their designs. IP-XACT was created by the SPIRIT Consortium as a standard to enable automated configuration and integration through tools.The goals of the standard are...

, an XML schema for vendor-neutral descriptions of design components, and SystemRDL

SystemRDL

The SystemRDL language, supported by the SPIRIT Consortium, was specifically designed to describe and implement a wide variety of control status registers. Using SystemRDL, developers can automatically generate and synchronize register views for specification, hardware design, software development,...

, a language for describing registers in components. In June 2009 it was announced that SPIRIT will merge with another EDA standards organization, Accellera

Accellera

Accellera is a standards organization that supports a mix of user and vendor standards and open interfaces development in the area of electronic design automation and IC design and manufacturing. It is less constrained than the IEEE and is therefore the starting place for many standards. Once...

.

Membership

There are four levels of membership in the SPIRIT consortium. The Board of Directors (BoD) is the ruling body. Current members are:

• ARM Holdings
  ARM Holdings
  ARM Holdings plc is a British multinational semiconductor and software company headquartered in Cambridge. Its largest business is in processors, although it also designs, licenses and sells software development tools under the RealView and KEIL brands, systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip...
  
  
• Cadence Design Systems
  Cadence Design Systems
  Cadence Design Systems, Inc is an electronic design automation software and engineering services company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc...
  
  
• Freescale Semiconductor
  Freescale Semiconductor
  Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. is a producer and designer of embedded hardware, with 17 billion semiconductor chips in use around the world. The company focuses on the automotive, consumer, industrial and networking markets with its product portfolio including microprocessors, microcontrollers,...
  
  
• LSI Corporation
  LSI Corporation
  LSI Corporation is an electronics company based in Milpitas, California that designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters and mobile networks.-History:...
  
  
• Mentor Graphics
  Mentor Graphics
  Mentor Graphics, Inc is a US-based multinational corporation dealing in electronic design automation for electrical engineering and electronics, as of 2004, ranked third in the EDA industry it helped create...
  
  
• NXP Semiconductors
• STMicroelectronics
  STMicroelectronics
  STMicroelectronics is an Italian-French electronics and semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.While STMicroelectronics corporate headquarters and the headquarters for EMEA region are based in Geneva, the holding company, STMicroelectronics N.V. is registered in Amsterdam,...
  
  
• Synopsys
  Synopsys
  Synopsys, Inc. is one of the largest companies in the Electronic Design Automation industry. Synopsys' first and best-known product is Design Compiler, a logic-synthesis tool. Synopsys offers a wide range of other products used in the design of an application-specific integrated circuit...
  
  
• Texas Instruments
  Texas Instruments
  Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...
  
  

Contributing members perform the standardization work and donate time and effort to the production of new specifications.

Reviewing member status is a free membership for companies. These get early access to specifications to facilitate a deep review round of each proposal before it goes public.

Associate member status is similar to a reviewing membership but for academics and other not-for-profit organizations.

External links

• Spiritconsortium.org, the Spirit Consortium website