Virtual Socket Interface Alliance

1 VSI Builds Momentum to Solve Design Reuse Imperative (Larry Rosenberg, Chair, VSI Technical Committee, USA) For over twenty years now, alarmists have been warning the electronics industry of an emerging “design productivity gap”. This is based on the exponential growth of silicon implementation capacity which grows at a compound annual growth rate of over 58% per year. This should be compared to the most optimistic projection for productivity growth, which is around 23% per year. Hence, there should have been an exponentially growing gap between what silicon can hold and what designers can define into the silicon. This tutorial will explain in detail how the semiconductor/EDA industries have coped with this problem up to now and why the techniques that have served us so well for over 30 years, will no longer work in the future. In addition, silicon capacity finally has reached the point where true product convergence can occur i.e. complete designs comprising disparate technical domains can be merged onto a single System-Chip (SoC). The solution to both the “design productivity gap” and the “convergence challenge” can both solved by design reuse of Virtual Components. This is the vision on which the VSI Alliance was created.