Not for the first time, it’s become obvious that designing a bathroom is very similar to designing a chip. The effort requires a confident sense of the end-product you’re trying to accomplish – and then a great deal of necessary tedium.

Because these days, bathrooms and chips incorporate a huge number of IP blocks and the process of tracking down the final candidates, reworking the design over and over to see how each candidate fits in, then making the final selection, confirming with each IP vendor that the price and availability of their particular block meets your design budget and schedule, then nailing down the finished design, actually ordering and paying for the IP that will go into the design, and crossing your fingers that nothing untowards has happened between the moment you made your final part/IP selection and the moment the vendor’s supposed to pony up the goods.

The process of creating a bathroom or chip design that includes a great deal of IP is really complex. It requires a lot of shopping, validating, purchasing, receiving and integrating IP into the design.

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