IP-XACT is an XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 format that defines and describes electronic components and their designs

Circuit design

The process of circuit design can cover systems ranging from complex electronic systems all the way down to the individual transistors within an integrated circuit...

. IP-XACT was created by the SPIRIT Consortium

SPIRIT Consortium

The SPIRIT Consortium is a group of vendors and users of electronic design automation tools, defining standards for the exchange of SoC design information. The standards defined so far are IP-XACT, an XML schema for vendor-neutral descriptions of design components, and SystemRDL, a language for...

 as a standard to enable automated configuration and integration through tools.

The goals of the standard are

• to ensure delivery of compatible component descriptions from multiple component vendors,
• to enable exchanging complex component libraries between 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 for SoC
  System-on-a-chip
  A system on a chip or system on chip is an integrated circuit that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio-frequency functions—all on a single chip substrate...
  
   design (design environments),
• to describe configurable components using metadata
  Metadata
  The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
  
  , and
• to enable the provision of EDA vendor-neutral scripts for component creation and configuration (generators, configurators).

Approved as IEEE 1685-2009 on December 9, 2009, published on February 18, 2010.

Technical papers

• SPIRIT IP-XACT Controlled ESL Design Tool Applied to a Network-on-Chip Platform
• SPRINT Industrial IP Integration Flows based on IP-XACT Standards
• Using IP-XACT in complex SoC I/O Integration and SoC Register Management

External links

• Schemas of The SPIRIT Consortium
• The SPIRIT Consortium - Reference BusDefs
• SPIRIT IP-XACT Bus Definitions for AMBA
• SPIRIT achieves maturity with IP-XACT specifications, ED Tech Forum, September, 2006
• Berman, V.: Standards: The P1685 IP-XACT IP Metadata Standard, in: Design & Test of Computers, IEEE, April 2006, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp. 316–317