Industry Expert Blogs

The IP-SoC conference panel, “IPs on FPGA: Strategy and Vision,” was a learning experience for me. Coming from the software and silicon/ASIC/ASSP worlds, I thought I had a pretty comprehensive view of all the various IP licensing models and their technical implementations. But I learned something new that makes me feel positive about the FPGA’s abilities to finally offer a robust market of third party IP.

Before I get into that, let’s step back a bit. If you look at the past, the business models of the FPGA vendors and IP vendors clashed: As Rick Tomihiro (Xilinx), Bob Blake (Altera) and Tim Schnettler (Lattice) made clear on the panel, the goal of the FPGA vendor was to ship silicon. The IP that the customer would need to create a working product was something of an afterthought. FPGA companies could try to address the issue by providing a “buffet” of partner IP that an FPGA customer could pull from, but it was impossible for FPGA vendors to track what IP was used in each FPGA the customer shipped. There simply aren’t many IP companies willing to accept the economics of this. So even though the customer would love to have a “one-stop shop” and a “menu” of IP options from the FPGA vendor, he was left to select and contract for the IP on his own

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