Managing IP In Complex Devices


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Whether it is a smartphone, tablet, video game with home networking feature or any other digital device, each contains multiple subsystems with a mixture of IP blocks from either in-house development or licensed from third parties. Managing the subsystems, let alone the individual IP blocks and the interplay between all of them, is not getting any easier. In fact, wit... » read more

IP Tagging Resurfaces


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down with Kathy Werner, IP strategy and business manager inside of Freescale’s Design Technology Organization, to discuss tagging of soft IP. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: How new is the concept of IP tagging? Werner: IP tagging has been around for a long time. VSI Alliance was one of the first standards organizations that l... » read more

What’s A Subsystem?


The interchangeability of IP has proved to be a myth. While large companies have been able to tap into their internally developed IP quite successfully, the ability to use commercially available IP has proved to be limited—particularly outside of the standard IP world. That will change, but not in the way most of the small IP companies actually expected. While the barrier to entry for deve... » read more

Effects Unknown


f you really want to know what’s going on inside the IC design world, pick up a copy of the annual reports of the largest foundries. Then triangulate that with the earnings reports of the largest makers of computers and mobile electronics and the makers of EDA tools and IP. All three areas are experiencing a massive uptick, which is good news considering the travails of the past couple of ... » read more

The Quest For A Better IP Integration Methodology


By Ed Sperling With the amount of IP in SoC designs now hitting an estimated 70% to 90%, companies are scrambling to figure out a way to more consistently integrate that IP and to test that it will work as expected. This is easier said than done, however, for a number of reasons: There are numerous types of IP, ranging from I/O to logic and memory. Not all IP is of equal quality. ... » read more

Engineering’s Growing Blacklist


The number of system-level design flaws is rising, and they’re not just little mistakes. These are high-profile errors that are making headlines all over the globe. While it’s debatable whether Toyota’s problem was a hardware or software design glitch, the simple fact is there was a design flaw somewhere. That’s true for the BP Gulf of Mexico leak, regardless of who’s responsible f... » read more

The Growing Importance Of Subsystems


By Ed Sperling A growing reliance on third-party IP is beginning to expand well beyond just IP blocks and into full subsystems, opening significant growth opportunities for companies competing in this market as well as enormous business and technical challenges. The IP market is ripe for this kind of convergence. Complexity at advanced process nodes coupled with time-to-market demands has e... » read more

Tailoring IP, Tools And Flows


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As SoC and system complexity rises continually and software drives much more in a system, specific vertical application areas will require tailored IP and tool flows to allow designers to meet time-to-market demands. Today, many systems are designed around a platform, which contains most of the STAR IP—processors, GPUs, memory controllers, interconnects, memory s... » read more

Tailoring IP, Tools And Flows


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As SoC and system complexity rises continually and software drives much more in a system, specific vertical application areas will require tailored IP and tool flows to allow designers to meet time-to-market demands. Today, many systems are designed around a platform, which contains most of the STAR IP—processors, GPUs, memory controllers, interconnects, memory s... » read more

Experts At The Table: IP Integration Hurdles


By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss IP integration issues with Ken Brock, senior staff product marketing manager for logic libraries in Synopsys’ Solutions Group; Kalar Rajendiran, senior director of marketing at eSilicon; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta; and Jim McCanny, CEO of Altos Design Automation. What follows are excerpts of that conversati... » read more

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