A Knowledge Representation Format for Virtual IP Marketplaces

For the design of Systems on Chip (SoC) it is essential to reuse previously developed and verified virtual components in order to meet nowadays requirements in reliability, correctness, and time-to-market. On the downside, deciding about reusing a third-party component in a design situation can consume substantial time and resources. This is especially true in situations where many potential candidates exist due to the large amount of functional, non-functional, and quality related aspects of each component. In order to facilitate the search for components in an internet-based market scenario, we have developed a retrieval system that utilizes structural CBR. The approach relies on XML descriptions of each component that constitute the case base. In this paper we present IPCHL, which was originally intended to be a simple schema for such descriptions. As a consequence of the growing demands for structured documentation, IPCHL has become a representation format for virtual component descriptions incorporating many of the CBR knowledge containers.