The IP-XACT (standarized as IEEE 1685) specifications, delivered by the SPIRIT consortium, and now part of Accellera, are enabling and standardizing effective IP reuse. Members of the consortium are EDA providers (Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Cadence, Magillem Design Services, …), IP providers (ARM…) or system integrators (TI, NXP, ST…). The IP-XACT specs are defining human-readable documentation for language-independent, interoperable IP module descriptions and tool interfaces using an XML databook format. The IP-XACT description can document for example an IP interface, its registers and bit fields, pointers to the VHDL or SystemC files which define its RTL or TLM implementation, or its software views.

IP-XACT provides a common specification mechanism to:

• Ensure delivery of compatible IP descriptions from multiple IP vendors
• Better enable importing and exporting complex IP to/from/between EDA tools
• Better express configurable IP using IP meta-data
• Better enable provision of EDA vendor-neutral IP creation and configuration scripts

IP-XACT deliverables are composed of:

• IP meta-data schema
• BusDef (Bus Definitions)
• Component (Component schema for cores, peripherals, buses and components)
• Syntax and semantic rules
• 2 Configuration and Generation interfaces
• TGI (Tight Generator Interface) provides a standard method to link tools into an IP-XACT enabled SoC design environment

ESL Ecosystem around IP-XACT