Industry Expert Blogs
Sonics and ARM craft agreementEETimes Blog - Brian BaileyMay. 02, 2013 |
IP has become a fact of life in all modern chips. No longer can any company design everything themselves and they rely on an increasing stable of partners to help them produce an end product that will save them time, money and reduce risk. But when a company licenses a piece of IP, they potentially take on another type of risk. What if their IP provider did not own all of the rights to the contents of their design? This is not something that many engineers worry about, but managers and legal counsel of large companies do. I can remember in the early days of IP licensing, one of the most hotly contested clauses had to do with indemnification, basically deciding who would end up being responsible if lawsuits emerged.