On Cores
Meditations on the semiconductor and IP industries
By Warren Savage, CEO, IPextreme
Monday Sep. 15, 2008
One on One: Joe Abler
Next in our interview series, Joe Abler offers insights on the IP market.
Joe Abler is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the IBM Systems and Technology Group at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Joe is a member of IBM’s Common Platform Strategy team, driving a technology collaboration of IBM, Chartered Semiconductor, and Samsung Electronics. Joe’s responsibility is to develop and strengthen alliances with industry IP and EDA providers to build a comprehensive ecosystem enabling the Common Platform’s base technologies and delivering client solutions. He joined the IBM Microelectronics Division in 1999, bringing to the team over 20 years of experience in networking, storage, and consumer related technologies.
Joe,
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me and share your perspectives about the IP market. Coming from one of the most important high tech companies in the world I think our readers are very interested in your opinion. Let's get started.
1. As an company that works a lot with IP, what is your #1 challenge you have with your customers and what are you doing about it?
We are both an IP company in that we have internal IP development to support our end-user technology customers as well as an IP customer in that we acquire 3’rd party IP to complement our offerings. I’ll answer these questions with respect to our end-user technology customers. Our top challenge is to deliver very early in each technology cycle a broad set of validated IP covering multiple market application spaces and product requirements. We address this through a combination of internal development to focus our resources on high-end/unique customer requirements complemented with 3’rd party IP to deliver more of the standards based functions. This requires us to develop close partnerships with a few key industry players who are willing to invest resources early in a technology cycle, deal with technology churn, and also be willing to accommodate a reasonable number of customer specific requirements.
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?
A common goal from customers is to achieve product level differentiation, but some strive to achieve it in all aspects of a product from base technology and basic IP all the way through to software applications stack. The more successful set are diligent in selecting the best technology and component level IP solutions and then focusing their differentiation targets on product form, features, software applications, cost, time to market, and other aspects which in the end are more critical to product success. The companies which continue to strive for differentiation in base IP tend to spend significant resources and time on IP definition, selection, modification, and customization, and also tend to struggle with the balance between internal development and leveraging 3’rd party IP.
3. The IP business model undergoes periodic attack from the media, do you think the IP business model is broken? Please elaborate.
There’s always room for improvement in any business model, but no, I don’t believe the IP model is broken. The model may appear broken to those who are looking for it to be the end-all answer, but we don’t believe that’s the right model. We successfully use 3’rd party IP providers to complement our internal development, allowing us to prioritize internal resources to our most critical programs while broadening our customer solutions with industry standard 3’rd party IP.
4. The IP market is dominated (revenue-wise) by a few large players, yet there remains hundreds of small outfits. Why is that?
The large players heavily target the high demand, mainstream, standardized IP market segments. This unfortunately leads to inefficient overlap among the large players, but also leaves many openings for smaller players to enter with customized or less mainstream offerings. Those smaller companies who are serious about the IP business can provide value and fill a big void. However there are also many small players who have a piece of IP that for whatever reason was spun out of a previous development program, business, or other venture who enter the space feeling their IP can be another quick, easy revenue stream. These companies often aren’t serious about the business long-term, and actually do a disservice to the business model. Separating the serious players from the one hit wannabes is the challenge for IP users.
5. Should there be more or less IP companies?
What’s needed is a reliable approach to IP validation and evaluation. The number of providers is irrelevant, with the exception that increasing numbers makes evaluating to a common criterion more difficult.
6. What role should EDA companies play in the IP market?
EDA companies should do what they do best; provide tools to shorten development cycles, improve verification capabilities, and increase designer productivity. Of course these aren’t specific to IP development, but more collaboration early in technology cycles is needed among technology companies, IP developers, and EDA companies in order to fully enable a new technology node such that product designers have a stable platform to work from.
7. What role should Service companies play in the IP market?
The definition of Service company is really too broad to answer this concisely. Similar to EDA companies, design service companies could collaborate earlier in development cycles to learn new IP and understand technology-specific issues. The role of companies providing IP aggregation services may warrant specific mention. These companies can set the stage for a very valuable set of services to help grow the industry. The challenge of course is to address potential quality, warranty, functional refresh, and other issues once the IP supplier is at least once-removed from the developer.
8. To what extent do you think the IP industry has come to grips with its quality issues?
Individual IP providers are addressing quality issues through their own measures as dictated by the needs of their customers (which are not always in synch with each other). Attempts by the “IP industry” to improve quality are certainly well intentioned and have had significant effort behind them, but they simply haven’t been successful to date. Quality checklists and other standardized evaluation approaches simply haven’t been picked up and used within the industry, and they likely won’t until IP users begin to demand them of IP providers.
9. Is there a need for greater standardization in IP?
The only thing worse than no standards is too many standards (my favorite standards mantra). Developing more standards without addressing the core problem of failed standards simply dilutes and further weakens the existing standards.
10. Ten years from now, what does the IP market look like?
Consolidation to a smaller number of big players is of course the easy answer. I also believe it will entail offerings consisting of more complete subsystems (both hardware & firmware). Such a direction will be needed to support ever increasing levels of integration as well as to improve quality through the delivery of full subsystems proven to support a complete application (as opposed to subsystems today being assembled from separately sourced, supposedly proven, IP component blocks).
Posted by Warren Savage on Monday Sep. 15, 2008
|
Add a Comment
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.
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.
