Sunday Feb. 03, 2008
Transparency Arrives
I ask my readers to forgive me for what follows as seemingly self-serving, but felt the related background of the recently announced "IPextreme Core Store™ " might be of interest. Jim’s keynote stuck in my head for most of the year— it makes sense that if every chip contains so much IP, surely the acquisition of that content has to become more streamlined. But how?
The answer came to us as a result of looking at the sort of customer inquiries that were coming in. We found that customers could be categorized into two types: those that knew exactly what they wanted, and those that needed help picking out the IP that was just right for their application. The first group also had a tendency to want it cheap. Customers also didn’t much like the industry standard model of paying a fixed percentage fee for maintenance and support. They asked “Are you on the EDA model of expecting to pay for bug fixes? Sure I’d like maintenance to catch any upgrades but not at that price. And support, with that price, what is my motivation for RTFM? Shoot, read it for me!”
So, what if we could deliver a set of products that were easy to understand, package them highly to make them easy to use, and sell them in a straightforward way to those smart engineers out there that know exactly what they want and don’t need a lot of hand-holding? And let’s test market elasticity by making it really low-cost and easy to buy. Oh, and who needs the sales guy, get rid of that while you’re at it. Make it like iTunes.
And so, the Core Store was born. In its initial release the store features a modern entry-level 32-bit microcontroller, and a basic set of peripherals to surround it. A good start for any SoC.
The question of whether or not the IP industry is needed or will fade away is an answered question. The industry has fully transitioned to using IP and there is no turning back. The IP market is expected to grow 17-18% in 2008 which means that our industry shows no signs of slowing down. The only question is whether we are moving to a new era of licensing where the old business models breakdown when over 80% of an SoC consists of licensed IP. The Core Store may be the first in a wave of new models that mark the transition of the IP industry to a new era.
Time will answer that question. My only advice: listen to your customers, they may be trying to tell you something.
1 Reader Comments
On Feb. 19, 2008,
HG said:
If your talking transparency, you need to include the ole Fee-Per-Use pricing model. If I am the type of customer that knows what I want, then it's even more wasteful to have to pay that support fee over-and-over-and-over for the same IP. Let me buy it once, outright, and I'll support myself. Heck...I probably know more about the IP after that first project than the IP provider does :-)
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About the Author
Warren Savage, President and CEO of IPextreme, is a well-known and published authority in the field of semiconductor intellectual property.
He has a long history of pushing the envelope of design methodology from his work in fault tolerant computing at Tandem Computers in the 1980's and driving reliable design metholologies into commercial practice at Synopsys for its DesignWare IP product in the 1990s.
Much of his thinking became embodied in the seminal book on IP reuse, the Reuse Methodology Manual. Warren is taking his vision to the next level with his latest company, IPextreme, which is focused on enabling broad commercialization of IP captive in large semiconductor companies.
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