Tuesday May. 06, 2008
IP Urban Legends
Stop me if you heard this one before. An engineering manager tells you a horror story of purchasing an IP core purely on the basis of price. Engineering wanted to other more expensive solution, but management instructed to go with the cheapest solution.
The chip came back and didn’t work, costing the company months of rework, slipping the schedule. In the end it cost the company more than buying the more expensive solution in the first place.
I have heard this nearly identical story from three different companies and started wondering whether this is an urban legend or whether companies are still buying on price versus quality. In all cases, the story teller was a little vague about what the IP title was and who the provider was.
Variations of the tales include:
- The CEO of the company plays golf with the CEO of the IP company
- The core was only rescued with the effort’s of the company’s engineering staff, who by the end of the project knew the core better than the original designers of the core
The story has all the attributes of an urban legend:
- It’s plausible
- It’s mysterious
- It’s told from a 3rd-party point of view
- It’s told as a narrative
- It’s short on specifics, such as names, dates, place
- It’s a cautionary tale
The question I wonder is whether these stories are really all true and that there is still enough bad IP on the market to perpetually generate these horror stories. Or are these stories a reflection of an IP market which has grown up to an extent that there is enough organizational memory associated with IP quality disasters over the years that all the stories morph into the same tale as handed down from generation to generation of chip designs.
It’s not been my experience that most customers base their purchasing decision solely on price. Rather, the opposite. We regularly see customers willing to spend more for the right solution, with the right quality for their chip. With so much IP now being used on ASICs and ASSP’s the risk of getting a chip back that doesn’t work is far more expensive than getting that last bit of discount from your IP supplier. Customers are realizing that you get what you pay for, but of course driving a hard bargain along the way.
If these stories are really narratives of old disasters that have morphed into a new kind of urban legend then we have moved into a new era of high technology where the stories of our historic hardships have become codified into our techno-culture. And that’s not an entirely bad thing.
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Enable Your Dreams with IP
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It's like Déjà vu all over again
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News of our Death Greatly Exaggated
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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