Even this deep into the era of IP and design reuse, it’s been my thesis that things are not quite as far along as many in the industry would like you to believe. With that attitude in hand, I spoke with three different companies in the IP space who disagree, although they admit issues still remain.
You can read my conclusions below from what they had to say, or you can read the original interviews and draw your own conclusions …
* Hal Barbour, CEO at CAST
* Warren Savage, CEO at IPextreme
* Bernd Stamme, Marketing Director at Kilopass Technology
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Where things stand …
* IP is a reality: Over the last 10 years, the reluctance to buy IP has subsided, because third-party IP is better than ever, and the companies that sell it have come to see themselves principally as product companies, not services companies.
* Lots of different types of IP: Vendors are selling processor cores, standards-based busses, mixed-signal blocks, back-end design blocks, software blocks, drivers, foundation IP, etc., or any combination of the above.
* Standards and tools: Various wrapper standards and IP integration tools are easing the burden of using IP in a design.
* NIH still a reality: Concern still lingers, often without basis, that if I didn’t design it myself, I shouldn’t bank my product and my job on somebody else’s design bit.
* Risk Aversion still a reality: Buying IP is still not great for the highly risk adverse, people who need to guarantee a block is interoperable, meets required specs, and has been sufficiently deployed to work out the bugs. (more…)
