The VSI Alliance, an IP standards body for the electronics industry, says the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology donated its Deliverables Checklist to VSIA.

"We are impressed with VSIA's leadership in quantifying a metric for evaluating IP and felt that we could add value to the QIP and to the industry through the donation of our deliverables checklist," said Professor Philip Chan, dean of engineering and the principal investigator of the project from HKUST. "Additionally, we look forward to supporting QIP in China and we hope that we can work together on further development of QIP and other VSIA initiatives."

The agreement was based on the organizations' common interests in developing an international standard for evaluating semiconductor IP. Together the VSIA and HKUST will further develop the methodology and tools within the VSIA Quality IP Metric with the addition of the Deliverables Checklist. The two groups will also discuss ongoing work on QIP and other VSIA standards and are collaborating on a memorandum of understanding to extend this work to three universities in Mainland China.

Over the next year, the HKUST Deliverables Checklist donation and future enhancements will be integrated into the VSIA QIP Metric, enhancing the portion of the metric that measures an IP provider's deliverables. Deliverables include items such as: documentation, logic design, design for test, functional verification and timing-and-power analysis deliverables. In support of this integration, VSIA has invited HKUST into the IP Quality Pillar as a voting member and both organizations have agreed to work together to further development of the QIP Metric.

HKUST developed the deliverables checklist as an SIP tool that will allow third party providers to evaluate customers' IP by categorizing deliverables using quality evaluation line items. It can be used to automate the generation of objective evaluation data for the determination of customers' SIP quality, ultimately easing the process of IP integration.

"HKUST has put in a great deal of time and effort into the successful creation of the deliverables checklist and we are pleased that they recognized the value of combining the efforts of both groups," said Kathy Werner, VSIA President. "We look forward to the successful integration of the checklist and to the benefit it will bring to the industry."