Scottish Enterprise today said that it had introduced the Virtual Component Exchange (VCX) under the auspices of its Alba Project to specialise in the exchange of semiconductor intellectual property. The Alba Centre is a project set up by Scottish Enterprise to encourage companies and universities in Scotland to train up chip designers to create system-on-a-chip devices, said a representative. Partners in the venture include ARM, Cadence, ISS, Mentor Graphics, Motorola, Phoenix, Siemens, TSMC from Taiwan and Toshiba. The representative said that VCX was "to find a way of trading intellectual property securely and efficiently". That will shorten design cycles. The Alba Project has a campus based in Livingstone, Scotland, which also includes a support centre for the project's partners. The representative said that the omission of other well known semi companies, including NatSemi and Intel, was not deliberate or planned. It hoped to pull other players into the project. (R) Click here for more stories