Even this deep into the era of IP and design reuse, it’s been my impression that things are not quite as far along as many in the industry would like you to believe. With that attitude in mind, I spoke with Bernd Stamme, Director of Marketing & Applications at Kilopass Technology, who convinced me otherwise, although with several caveats.
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Q: What kind of IP are people buying these days?
Bernd Stamme: They’re buying everything that has to do with performance – computer performance, networking performance, and elements that control that performance.
The one way you can distinguish yourself from the competition is to go faster. You can use IP for CPUs or GPUs, or off-the-shelf interfaces. At some point, you’ll run out of what you can get, however, and you’ll need to build auxiliary units around it to improve performance for certain operations. Then you’ll be building co-processors, specific circuits to accelerate [the system] and get better performance than your competition.
Q: How do you know what IP to use and when? (more…)