Industry Expert Blogs

Anyone who believes that IP can’t be a profitable business is clearly living in the past century. Take a look at the major IP players in processors, memory, and verification IP (VIP) and you’ll see that there’s “gold in them thar hills.” The reason there’s money there is because IP has simply become an essential part of nanometer SoC design and is an essential resource multiplier that permits SoC design teams to spend resources on product differentiation rather than wheel reinvention. For example, no design team is building its own processors any more. That would be crazy. It’s not that it’s so hard to design a 32-bit RISC processor, a good grad-student design team can whomp one up in a long weekend. Nope, designing a processor isn’t the hurdle; supporting it is. Creating the software-development tools—compiler, assembler, linker, loader, debugger, etc—is one hurdle; Keeping the tools current is another; supporting their use in real designs is yet another. There’s clearly an IP business there.

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