Content area
Full Text
The economic and engineering justifications for leveraging an intellectual-property (IP) business model have not changed in the last five years-the point at which the concept came to the forefront of electronics design. It is still about time-to-market, the efficient use of engineering resources and added competitive advantage.
However, IP can only deliver on the promise of better products faster if it can be used and reused easily.
The question is, how does one go about productizing an IP core?
A common misperception of most participants in the system-onchip domain is the need for very detailed, thorough documentation. Claims that vast quantities of documentation are required are based on the precept that the efficiency tool being purchased is not intuitive to use. However, if an IP core comes packaged in an easy-to-use manner, and if it complies with constructs designers are familiar with, documentation takes on the same significance as it does with any EDA tool. It is important, but not as important as a robust feature set.
Furthermore, reading documentation is not a task designers are prone to do voluntarily. If an IP core can be productized to require less documentation, designers will prefer that core to others.
Targeting programmable logic dramatically reduces the number of potential integration flows, making it possible for IP providers to fully productize their Cores for seamless integration into those flows. Users of high-density PLDs typically target a very limited number of tools, and verifying a core for those tools allows it to reach productization maturity for a market composed of tens of thousands of users.
Four-fifths done
By comparison, when designing IP for ASICs, providers typically must stop development at about 80 percent completion and wait for a customer to define the final details of the integration flow, which can include any number of third-party or custom-owned tools. In that model, the vendor is counting on the sales cycle to provide a buffer schedule to complete the core. With PLDs, an IP provider does not need to stop development and wait for final...