Posts Tagged ‘IP’
Thursday, February 27th, 2014
It makes it worthwhile to show up for work on days when you get to have a conversation with people like the folks of Sonics, a System IP vendor based in Silicon Valley. Articulate and knowledgeable, they have a nuanced understanding of how the IP business works, its challenges and opportunities.
When I spoke to them last week about my ongoing project to assemble IP for the chip in my Dick Tracy keychain, President & CEO Grant Pierce and VP of Operations Raymond Brinks were both on the call. We started by talking about how IP is priced.
Per Pierce: “The conditions under which various customers buy and use IP can be quite different. We have some customers who are fairly sophisticated. We sell [such customers] licensed IP, offer some initial training, and then off they go. After that, apart from an occasional email, we have little contact with them. There are customers, however, who are opposite in the extreme.
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Tags: AMBA, ARM, Cadence, Drew Wingard, Grant Pierce, IP, Nokia, OCP-IP, PIF, Raymond Brinks, Sonics, Synopsys, Tensilica, TI
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Thursday, October 24th, 2013
Let’s just be bold and identify the elephant in the room: If IP providers and/or EDA tool vendors really wanted standards that were ubiquitous, complete, and effective, they would have implemented them years ago. But they don’t. Similarly, if IP users and/or EDA tool users really wanted standards that were universal, robust and truly useful, they would have demanded them years ago. But they don’t.
The truth is that IP providers are happiest when they’re insisting that their proprietary interface is the best, and ergo should be the de-facto industry standard. And it goes without saying that whatever they’re providing inside of their black box is, of course, best-in-class. Certainly no standards are ever going to be inserted in there, and for good reason! Full stop.
Meanwhile, IP users clearly consider the problem of integrating IP into their projects as an accepted, even advantageous cost of doing business here in the 21st century. The way they integrate third-party IP into their systems is tantamount to a secret sauce – one that’s cooked up in NDA arrangements between the user and the provider – and not something any IP user wants to make public by way of standards, or any other device, for fear their hard work learning/mastering the integration of IP, if revealed, might give a leg-up to the competition.
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Tags: EDA, Elephants, IP, Standards
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Thursday, February 14th, 2013
After the euphoniously monikered IP provider, Uniquify, announced several weeks ago that the more whimsically monikered organization, Pixelworks, is using Uniquify’s DDR memory controller subsystem IP for multiple distinct processors that Pixelworks is, in turn, providing to TV makers who make 4Kx2K ultra high-def systems, one question still remained: How did Pixelworks know to use Uniquify’s offering?
According to a January 2013 article in IEEE Spectrum, knowing what IP to use in a project here in the 21st century is fairly easy knowledge to come by. I don’t know what planet the author of the op-ed piece, “Other People’s Knowledge”, lives on but it doesn’t seem to be the one that I hear about from the folks who make or buy third-party IP.
In fact, those people seem to indicate that knowing what IP to use in a particular project continues to be far more art than science. In particular, because until a system, or sub-system, is fully defined, modeled and simulated – let alone, manufactured and deployed in the field – one can never really know how a piece of IP is going to work in the environment into which it’s been placed.
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Tags: BarcoSilix, Cadence, DDR memory controller IP, Eureka Technology, IP, Synopsys, TI, Uniquify, Xilinx
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Thursday, January 24th, 2013
Sometimes life gets away from you. You post a blog lamenting too little coverage of IP at DATE and DAC, receive in response a number of lively emails, and then sit on all of it because life’s gotten away from you. Among those emails is a telling note from the folks at IPextreme offering to send you some marketing materials they claim is relevant to your thesis about IP, EDA, and conference-coverage disconnects. You accept their offer, but because life is still getting away from you, when the big white envelope from IPextreme arrives, it sits in the InBox, ignored and unopened.
Finally the moment arrives when you can no longer allow life to get away. You open the envelope, examine the contents, stagger back in amazement, and after muttering omg several times, sit down to write this blog. Xena, IPextreme’s Warrior Princess, the Graphic Novel & Morality Play will be ignored no more. As you flip through the pages – all 36 of them – you take another sip of wine and wonder why other companies have been ignoring not just Xena, but all she represents.
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Tags: Graphic Novel, IP, IPextreme, SIP, Warren Savage, Xena
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Thursday, September 27th, 2012
Article source: DCD
Digital Core Design, an IP Core provider and System-on-Chip design house from Poland, has introduced a USB [IP Core] combo pack, which consists of Audio, Human Interface Device and Mass Storage platforms. It’s only up to the project criteria, if either a standalone USB Device Controller or a complete set of USB solutions will be implemented in silicon.
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) connects more than computers and peripherals. Some say, that it has the power to connect the whole new digital world. That’s why, a trusted and safe connection is crucial. – Nowadays it’s hard to imagine a digital device without a USB port – no matter if it’s a standard, mini, micro or even a converter – says Jacek Hanke, CEO of Digital Core Design – And for that reason, we introduced the USB [IP Core] combo pack, which is a complete solution for almost all Universal Serial Bus related designs.
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Tags: Core, IP, USB
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