Industry Expert Blogs

In a panel discussion hosted by IP Extreme Wednesday, an interesting question surfaced: is it better to adapt silicon intellectual property (IP) to you design by configuring it, or by paying the vendor to customize it? This is an old discussion, but both financial realities and growing design complexity insure that it will continue.

The arguments in favor of configurable IP are both convincing and mostly economic. The big beneficiary is the IP developer who, with very little pricing leverage, has to get as many design wins out of each IP core development as possible. So instead of developing a family of USB 3.0 cores, for example, most IP vendors develop what is in essence a compiler to generate USB 3.0 controllers, hoping to cover any plausible configuration requirements.

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