Mentor Graphics – A New Strategy for Semiconductor Intellectual Property
[ Back ]   [ More News ]   [ Home ]
Mentor Graphics – A New Strategy for Semiconductor Intellectual Property

Introduction

At the end of March Mentor Graphics announced a technology launch of subsystem intellectual property, beginning with the industry’s first USB subsystem solution from a single-source EDA provider. I had a chance to interview Bill Martin, General Manager of the IP Division, and Rick Tomihiro, Director of Marketing for the IP Division, about the change in strategy.

Brief Bio from Rick.
Rick: I started my career as a CPU designer at Amdahl. I continued that at STU Computer Research and then at Tandem Computers. I developed an X86 processor at Chips and Technologies. Then I switched into a marketing function. I was Director of Marketing for NexGen which was acquired by MAD. Then I went to work for Synopsys for 8 years and ran IP marketing. I left Synopsys three years ago to run sales and marketing at a design services and fabless ASIC company. About a year ago I joined Mentor.

What caused you to come back to an EDA vendor?
I have a lot of experience in IP. I like working in the IP market. I knew Bill from Synopsys. He recruited me into Mentor. I think it was a good decision. I am having a lot of fun here.

Bill: We are setting new paths and directions which is always fun to do, to go off and change how the world sees a solution. That can be a lot of fun.

When did you take over the IP division?
Bill: I took it over in October 2005. When Mike Katz left Mentor, I was asked to come and take over the group.

What did you do before that?
My entire career or just at Mentor?

Both!
I got a BS in Computer Engineering from Illinois. Got an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas. I was at Mostek for five years doing microcontroller and memories. After that I went to VLSI Technology. Ten of the years were in the design centers working with lots of customers, doing a very successful business, For the last two years at VLSI Technology I worked for CTO Bob Paine. We did all the strategic planning for the group. Anything from process packaging, libraries, design kits. You name it, we did it for the entire corporation. I left there after 12 years and went to Synopsys. There I rolled out PrimeTime, Chip Architect and Formality and killed the Motis product. I had some friends that had come to Mentor and they recruited me to come here. I was inside the consulting division and ran it for 5 years. Then I was part of the sales team for a year and half working on a lot of internal logistical errors and problems we had to get fixed. Then they said go and take care of the IP group. So I came over in October 2005.

I understand that the embedded software group is being merged with the IP group.
Actually, we just announced that internally. We merged the two teams about 4 or 5 weeks ago basically around this kind of reasoning. We came up with this about 9 months ago. We have been working on it. The USB is the first one that we got fully certified. It just made a lot of sense to merge the two teams. It’s all embeddable IP whether it is software or silicon IP. It makes a lot of sense to get them together.

If you look at the embedded system IP portfolio there is just a real strength the between anything form development tools to platforms to OS to middleware to silicon IP. You can start to connect them and pretty quickly create some pretty large powerful solutions for our customer base. We just think there is a wealth of products that we can get to our customers that can make them extremely successful and get them to market a lot faster.

Presumable you had these separate products before. So is it bringing the test and integration parts together that is new?
Up to around 9 months ago, it may seem strange but the two divisions did not do a lot of work together. We did some work but not a lot. When we started working on these subsystems, it really crossed over the line on both sides right to where we had to work very closely together in the same lab and do a lot of testing to make sure things worked.

This past year we have had pairs of customers, the silicon supplier and the end product maker, probably about 8 really large customers, come to us. They were all having problems between middleware and the controller. They would say that our controller has a bug and we have got to fix it. We said that we were not so sure. We had done a lot of quality checking. We’ve conformed to the standard, passed certification, all of that stuff. We would like to replicate the problem. They could not give us a simple test to show us. Some of our customers brought in small test systems, small boxes that they used in their development and verification. One brought over their box. It took them probably a day to get it back up and running due to the jostling that it took in the flight here. Once they got it up and running, it took literally about an hour for our team of guys to see what was wrong. We told the customers here’s the problem in the middleware. It is not doing the right interfacing with the controller. The customer said that that is replicated throughout the code. But we can go off and change a couple of instances and see if it gets past this point and works. They came back that day and actually retested. It got past the problem point. They said they would go back home and fix the rest of the code. We never heard from them again. We know that they launched their product, a high demand consumer product, into the marketplace and they were successful. We have seen that experience replicated by a lot of customers. We said we have a unique opportunity here. We happen to have both components inside Mentor. Why not put them together, fully test them and make sure they work, are certified and supported by one vendor, namely us, rather than have customers buy from multiple vendors and point fingers at different vendors saying your stuff is not working? We can cut all of that stuff out. We can make sure that everything works and is fully certified. Customers can buy it from us, get support from one place, and accelerate their development time. They don’t have to fix these problems or develop solutions in this area. They just buy it from us.

How big were the two groups before the merger?
We are talking about a combined group of 250 to 300 people. I do not know the exact count. We have development groups around the world. There are probably eight different sites between the divisions. It goes from Cairo to the US to Pakistan.

Is the combined unit 50% semiconductor IP and 50% embedded software?
It is very similar to what our customers are seeing. There is a lot more on the software side. Don’t forget on the embedded side we do not just have IP like the Nucleus cell lab, we’ve got the Inflexion Platform, the developer tools area. We have people working on other tools not just embedded IP. This includes platforms to help you develop your system faster but it is not true IP that you put inside the chip. I do not have the breakdown on the number of people in the EDGE area or on the Inflexion Platform or the Nucleus.

On the revenue side how much did the groups generate?
I don’t have the final numbers. You would have to get that data form our industry intelligence person. (He would not give me the data.)

Does a company like ARM compete in this area?
It is interesting. They have a processor and might have some of the PHY but I have not seen much in the middleware area or any of the controllers.

Rick: They do not have middleware. They have a couple of PHYs for PCI-Express and such but they do not get into the controller space. It does not make sense for them to do any middleware in the IP space.

Is there anybody in the controller space of significance?
The big players are Synopsys and Chipidea. Synopsys has offerings for USB, Ethernet, SATA, PCI-Express, WUSB and DDR2. ChipIdea has offerings for USB, Analog, SerDes and DAC. Cadence has PCI-Express. None of these competitors have any middleware, a kernel or software development tools. A lot of companies do one of the standards but there are not many full line IP companies. The competition would be Synopsys.

Does Mentor offer any IP in a different area?
We have some peripheral IP like microcontrollers, AD51 type, UARTS and those kind of IPs.

Is the USB standard continuing to evolve?
Yes! They are looking at doing high speed USB interchip interconnect. Instead of having a USB connection that plugs into a separate board or device, they are developing a standard so that you can use USB to do chip to chip communication on the same board. You would use the USB protocol to transfer data from one chip to another.

You see evolution not just on USB but in Ethernet, storage and so on. Over time things have gotten faster and improved with technology to meet the needs of the consumer. They have all taken on additional capabilities. You can see that our product line has migrated with those. A real good case is the Ethernet product line. You can see where it started out at 1M. Now it is up to 10G. You are seeing the same thing with SATA. It was 1.0 and has gone to 2.6. It will probably go to 3.0. USB continue to migrate. The same with PCI-Express.

So there is job security I SIP?
There is. There has been a lot of contention in IP market. I think that there is a viable market that is starting to mature to where people are learning how to do business both from a supplier and from a consumer standpoint. You are starting to see some other initiatives in the industry whether is VSIA with their QIP score, or the SSA who has done some work to enable the ecosystem better. A lot of customers are realizing that there are only so many hours in the day. You have only so many designers. You have got to be looking at viable solutions to get the job done faster. One of these is buying quality IP and using that IP. Right now there are some trends in the market towards consolidation that will help everyone. Maybe now we will start getting some of these smaller IP providers out of the marketplace that really do not have the infrastructure whether it is in the development and validation of their cores to produce quality IP or if it is in the postsales support, they don’t have the bandwidth and resources to do a good job. It’s the sort of like the used car salesperson. You have some really good dealerships and some really good automakers but some other people who can taint the water. Over time some of those lower end people will either get thrown out of the business or will have to close their doors or they will understand that they will have to get acquired by somebody who will put some structure and infrastructure behind them to make sure they produce quality IP.

How do you charge for your IP?
Rick: We have various licensing models. Single use license. A term license where they can license the IP for say three years. There’s also an upfront license option. I spent eight years running IP marketing for Synopsys, so I know that as a major IP vendor we are very flexible in providing the license model customers need for their business. A lot of customers have different requirements. Some like a very low upfront fee. Some want to but it out. We have licensing models to satisfy all of that.

What about royalties?
We charge royalties on some very high value IPs such as when you get into some of the PHY IP at the newer technology nodes. But we do not charge a royalty for digital IP. If the customer says we do not want to pay an upfront fee or pay a very discounted licensing fee, we have an option for a royalty. In that case we can provide a share the risk kind of model.

What would the single use USB licensing fee be? Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars?
For the controller it is in the high tens of thousands of dollars, close to $100K. Each of the components is in that range, some a little above and some a little below $100K. The total subsystem, if you add the three components together, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bill: It also depends upon technology. Older technology has a different pricing curve than the latest technology node.

Does the embedded systems group target markets outside of the SIP market?
There is a lot of overlap between them. There are some open areas like VoIP where we have not done a lot of things. We are targeting areas where they can really it with their RTOS. We did a study of joint customers between the two divisions. What we saw was in some ways disappointing but in other ways was exciting. We had hundreds of customers on both sides but very few sales on both sides. We see that as a huge opportunity to pull products in either direction, either with our customers on the IP side to get them to use our embedded software products or vice versa. They were selling their product line to a lot of customers that did not pull through silicon IP. We said that is a huge opportunity to come in and sell a larger solution that works for our customer base.

If you look at any specific market such as USB market, the embedded software guys had a bunch of USB customers and the IP guys had a bunch of customers but there were very few common customers. Our sales process wasn’t working together. Having seen so many customers having problems we saw the opportunity not only to create sales pull but also to create a solution that solves customer problems.

Perhaps you could tell us something about the USB subsystem solution Mentor announced at the end of May.
Rick: Let’s backup and first talk about hardware design trends today. Increasingly complex SoCs have significantly more gates in the tens of millions and more functionality. Chip designs today require multiple processors, multiple clocking domains and multiple IP subsystems on each chip. With this increase in IP subsystems, the embedded software is becoming increasingly important. Since each of these IP subsystems has its own embedded software components, industry certification is also becoming more important. There’s more of it on each chip. For instance, you have a USB subsystem and a PCI-Express subsystem. Each of those has its own industry certification. Keeping up to speed for all these different standards and participating in working groups for each group is not something that engineering teams are able to do. If you have 3, 4 or 5 different standards on one chip, you are not sending your engineers to all of these working groups, keeping up with each standard. Most engineering teams are using third party IP or relying on companies like Mentor to provide those subsystems for them.

Engineering design teams need to create chips with many different subsystems and naturally focus on the top level subsystem which is the CPU subsystem. Most of these chips have at least one processor on them, like an ARM processor or whatever but a lot of the design team’s focus is on that CPU subsystem. Subordinate subsystems such as USB or PCI-Express, are usually neglected. They are implemented using third party IP and left to the end of the design cycle. Integration issues with these subsystems are mostly hardware-software related where there is no industry standards to address the compatibility of the hardware and the software. What we are doing is creating a solution that addresses these issues.

Our new strategy of IP subsystems is focused on reducing the total cost of IP. Besides whatever payment is made to the IP supplier there are costs in time and dollars associated with locating the IP, evaluation and modeling of the IP, verifying the IP, and integrating the IP.

Last year we faced integration issues with many of our customers. We lived those integration issues with customers who sometimes spent multiple months integrating software with their semiconductor IP to create each of these subsystems. According to our customers the integration issues were not in the interface between the digital controller and the mixed signal PHY because that is an industry standard interface. The issue that arises is the integration between the USB embedded software and the digital controller. That is brought on because in the past the digital controller was purchased from one vendor and the embedded software that controlls the controller was purchased from another vendor. The software includes things like the controller driver, the software stack, class drivers and so on.

What firms might sell this software?
Customers used to purchase software from companies like Jungo (USBWare and WinDriver) or third party USB vendors. A lot of customers that use Linux would take the free Linux stacks and try to modify them. A lot of customers would try to develop software in house for the semiconductor IP they purchased.

When we recently rolled out the IP subsystem announcement industry analyst Christian Heidarson from Gartner observed “Ensuring that software works correctly with an interface controller is a critical, manually intensive part of the design process, yet adds no differentiation to the final product. By obtaining both software and hardware IP from the same company, designers can dedicate resources to more valuable tasks.”

The first IP subsystem is in the USB space that is because of the complexity of USB software and the size of the USB market which is very large. It was a good place for us to start. This hardware-software solution is fully integrated, verified, certified and combined with Mentor’s world class support to make implementing USB subsystems much easier for our customers.

Our USB controller supports OTG. It also supports embedded host functions. It can be a device. It is a full featured USB high speed controller.

What is OTB?
On-the-Go! OTG is a kind of standard within the standard that allows products that can act as a USB host or a USB device. For instance, if you have a camera and you connect that camera to a PC, the camera might be a device. The PC is the host and is uploading pictures through the USB port. Some cameras, if they are OTG, can be connected directly to a printer. In that case the camera is acting as a host and the printer is acting like the device. The OTG controller allows the camera to act as a device sometimes and sometimes as a host.

We currently have two versions of the USB subsystem. One version is for customers who require a very small footprint. That is the MicroSW. It is not tied to any OS or processor. It takes up very little memory space. It is good for small hand held devices that don’t have a lot of memory. The Nucleus USB SW is full featured USB software that has many different class drivers for mass storage, for human interface, printer devices, still images and PictBridge. It has all the different class drivers that customers require to develop a very full featured device. Currently the MicroSW version is OS agnostic. We are currently working on an OS agnostic version of the Nucleus USB SW as well.

What does MUSBMHDRC stand for?
Bill: These are product names that I hate. Whoever chose that product name doesn’t like spaces. The way you decode the thing is Mentor USB high speed dual link controller. Need an acronym handbook. One of the things I wanted to do over a year and half ago, when I took over the division was to try and change the product names. When we started to looking into what it would take to do that, forget the cost, just the resources to get them all changed, it was a huge amount. So I said forget it.
Rick: I tried the same thing and engineering almost cut my head off.

Rick: Our current IP portfolio consists of USB, Ethernet, storage IP, peripheral IP and in the next couple of months we will be announcing our PCI-Express IP. We currently have the subsystem for USB but our embedded software division also has middleware products in the Ethernet and storage space for SATA. Throughout the year we will be announcing product in the Ethernet space and storage space. We are also currently developing PCI-Express middleware and will be announcing PCI-Express subsystem. So this is not just a USB centric strategy, it is across our entire IP portfolio. This is the way we will be delivering IP going forward; offering our customers complete subsystems for USB, Ethernet, SATA and PCI-Express. These products are available standalone. We feel the subsystem approach will provide a lot of value to our customers.

Our embedded software portfolio consists of three main areas. One is a development tools area. There is the Nucleus OS and all the middleware products. You see networking products, filesystem which is SATA middleware. You have USB middleware. We will also be adding PCI-Express middleware. Those all run under the Nucleus operating system. We will have versions of these middleware products that will run under any OS not just Nucleus. The embedded software portfolio includes development tools. So we have compilers, debuggers and so forth. We have also the Inflexion Application Platform which creates user interfaces for various area specific vertical markets.

Another advantage of our approach is that complete hardware/software subsystems go through certification together. When we certify our controller, we are also running our embedded software and our PHY. When our customers go for USB compliance and certification with USB interface, they know that all of the components of their USB subsystem have already gone through compliance together. They are very confident they won’t have any issues getting their certification and begin logo certified. The major subsystem IP market we focus on is the SoC and ASIC market for semiconductor IP. We also provide a lot of IP to OEMs. Our IP is available for FPGA. They are all listed at the major foundries.

Our first USB subsystem targets the rapidly growing embedded consumer market where a lot of emphasis is placed on a small memory footprint. That’s our MicroSW, low cost and low power. In these types of applications, most users want device embedded host or OTC functionality. Our subsystem supports all of those. That’s our current market focus.

In conclusion we supply the highest quality standards based semiconductor IP available. Now we have complete connectivity software subsystem. Mentor is the only company that has strength in both semiconductor IP and embedded software IP. It gives us a unique capability to provide fully integrated fully verified and certified subsystems to help customers accelerate product development.


The top articles over the last two weeks as determined by the number of readers were:

Double digit growth for the EDA market Europe 2007 -- 01consulting With over 50 tables and graphs, in a 56 pages document, this report provides a quantitative and qualitative picture of the market: market size, trend and vendors positions in each of the EDA product and services categories as well as in main European regions/countries: UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia and Italy.


Relative Size of European Revenue 2006

TSMC and Cadence Collaborate on 65-Nanometer Design Flow for Wireless Designs This collaboration focusing on nanometer wireless design has produced a new TSMC 65-nanometer RF process design kit (PDK) compatible with the new Cadence® Virtuoso® custom design platform, and downloadable RF, analog and mixed-signal (RF and AMS) design-flow demonstration packages for wireless designers. The demonstration packages contain TSMC 65-nanometer RF-enabled design examples for RF and AMS block creation, application notes and methodology documentation, and a design example-circuit database with complete execution scripts and flow, covering simulation, design creation and analysis, allowing designers to observe the complete flow in an actual design. The new Virtuoso IC based 65-nanometer RF PDK and TSMC's Nexsys™ 65-nanometer LP standard cell library are both downloadable from the TSMC Web site.

Toshiba Adopts Berkeley Design Automation's Analog FastSPICE(TM) Analog FastSPICE uses Berkeley Design Automation's proprietary Precision Circuit Analysis technology to deliver full SPICE accuracy, 5X to 10X faster and with 5X to 10X higher effective capacity than traditional SPICE tools. By solving the original device equations without any approximations, abstractions, or short cuts, Analog FastSPICE delivers identical waveforms as traditional SPICE simulators at every node on every run. The product is already proven on a wide range of circuits including wireless and wireline transceivers, high-speed I/Os, power regulators, LCD-TV source drivers, memory interfaces, PLLs (phase-locked loops), DLLs (delay-locked loops), sigma-delta ADC (analog-to-digital converters), and memories.

Agilent Technologies Announces Industry's First Integrated Verification Toolkit for Signal Integrity Design The Agilent Signal Integrity Verification Toolkit contains patented technology used in Agilent's real-time sampling oscilloscopes for accurate jitter characterization. ADS is the first and only EDA tool in the industry that provides diagnostic jitter analysis tools integrated into a high-speed channel design flow. This latest release of Agilent's ADS also provides significant enhancements to its serializer/deserializer, or SERDES, modeling capability

Other EDA News


Other IP & SoC News