Wednesday Sep. 17, 2008
One on One: Hal Barbour
Next in our interview series, Hal Barbour offers insights on the IP market.
Hal is the President of CAST, Inc. Hal earned a BSEE and worked several years as a circuit designer, before moving on to technical sales and marketing positions with GenRad, Intergraph, and HHB Systems (later acquired by Racal-Redac). Witnessing both stunning successes and colossal managerial failures, he has applied those lessons to leading semiconductor intellectual property provider CAST, Inc. the past several years. Pioneering a successful virtual and distributed organization model and using a lean, customer-oriented operations philosophy, Hal has helped CAST succeed and thrive in a volatile and challenging market.
Hal,
As a long-time player in the IP game, you've seen it all and lived to tell about it. Thanks for taking the time to sit down and share your impressions of the market and where its going. Let's start.
1. As an IP company, what is your #1 challenge you have with your customers and what are you doing about it?
Our biggest challenge — and our overriding goal — is to make the “IP experience” truly beneficial to our customers. This requires a fine balance among the relevant factors: technical quality, ease of integration, timely, effective support, and a fair price. If we fall short in any of these, the customer is left wishing they had just built the darn IP themselves. When we succeed at all of them, the customer barely thinks about us that because they’re so happy getting their new, competitive product out the door, on time and on budget.
2. Putting the shoe on the other foot, what do you perceive as your customer’s # 1 challenge and what should they be doing about it?
I think the biggest challenge for most of the customers we see is simply keeping their eye on the prize. The smart approach to fielding competitive products these days is to have a super sharp focus on whatever makes your new product — or your new version of an existing product — unique and really valuable to purchasers, and to get it out with quality and in time to make an impact on the market. Too often projects fail because their design teams get hung up for weeks comparing different vendors’ similar offerings for straightforward cores, or perhaps they fail to see how the features of a slightly more expensive core might save them months of much more valuable development time.
3. The IP business model undergoes periodic attack from the media, do you think the IP business model is broken? Please elaborate.
There is no more a single “IP business model” than there are a single type of electronic design or a single kind of company doing design. Instead there are a variety of business models, some of which have worked for some firms and some not. A company providing big star IP like ARM processors needs to build a huge universe to support their users, and so requires the huge potential revenue of royalties (but many firms have struck out with this approach). CAST, in contrast, tends to deal with simpler, standards-based IP, and we do OK with less risky source and netlist upfront project licenses. That “doing OK” means helping hundreds of designers succeed with complex projects over fifteen years, so one would have to admit that our business model works for us!
4. The IP market is dominated (revenue-wise) by a few large players, yet there remains hundreds of small outfits. Why is that?
I can’t speak for the rest of the firms out there, but as probably the biggest of the small guys, I can tell you that our goals at team CAST are no doubt very different from the goals of either an executive or a lower level worker at a large IP company. We’re all primarily looking to do interesting work that fills a real need, and to interact with interesting customers who appreciate and benefit from our products and support. The IP business as we have shaped it lets us do all this while also succeeding financially, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future.
5. Should there be more or less IP companies?
I think the market over time naturally determines whether there are more or fewer IP companies. Many hundreds have come and gone over the span of the IP industry (the same span of CAST’s lifetime, but the way!) yet every year new small firms spring up. Those that continue are obviously satisfying some need gone unmet by either the IP giants or the many other smaller firms.
6. What role should EDA companies play in the IP market?
EDA companies should either provide some unique IP value for their tool users or just get out of the way. With high-level languages, industry standards, etc., it’s hard to see what extra value an EDA company can give it’s users versus a third-party supplier (technical value, that is, not sales value). Agnoticism towards IP would seem to be a better EDA approach with regards to customers, allowing them to then choose the very best IP for their particular needs, increasing competition and ultimately increasing the variety and quality of the IP available to those EDA customers.
7. What role should Service companies play in the IP market?
We try to build and deliver IP that doesn’t need extra services for successful use (“IP that Works”). I know other IP providers do sell services — not necessarily because their IP is bad — but that’s going beyond IP itself. And there have been a plethora of design service companies that have developed IP as part of a services project and slapped a datasheet on their website to see if the could resell these functions. This type of IP provider has given the industry a bad name as their offerings are seldom robust, well documented and supported. Among actual services companies, any that don’t rely on IP to get big designs done faster and quicker probably won’t be able to offer competitive contracts and get happy customers for very long.
8. To what extent do you think the IP industry has come to grips with its quality issues?
I think this is self-regulating over as long a time as the IP market has now had: providers with poor quality products simply don’t survive. Any potential customer can now make an educated choice between IP from a proven provider — with a pretty straightforward set of risks and benefits — and IP from a new provider — with unknown risks that are perhaps worth the gamble to get better features or a lower price or some other potential value.
9. Is there a need for greater standardization in IP?
Market pressures are steadily moving design towards greater standardization — AMBA and OCP, for example — and IP needs to follow. In general, though, the only people who push for more “standardization” of IP itself are those who must manage huge libraries inside big companies, and those who making a business out of providing IP catalogs and portals.
10. Ten years from now, what does the IP market look like?
IP will be delivered at even higher levels of integration and/or abstraction, and there will be fewer companies over all as the skills and resources needed for this go beyond a couple of smart guys in their garage. And CAST will still be the biggest of the small guys!
Posted by Warren Savage on Wednesday Sep. 17, 2008
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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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