Why SoC Designers Need Purpose-Built Semiconductor IP Catalog Tools


Semiconductor intellectual property (IP) management, reuse, and change tracking are essential for efficiently creating chip designs based on proven building blocks, reducing your time-to-market, and maintaining good reputations throughout their lifetimes. Unfortunately, many SoC teams attempt to use existing tools like Git for these essential tasks, even though they are unsuitable and inconv... » read more

How To Calculate The ROI Of Semiconductor IP Management


Intellectual property (IP) is a vital asset for technology companies. IP is often a critical factor in the valuation of a company and must be protected from accidental damage, leakage, and other negative consequences of poor handling. In the context of silicon companies that work on building silicon chips, the term IP involves overseeing both internal IP developed by the company itself and exte... » read more

Optimizing IP Management For Chiplet-Based Designs


Chiplets are making big waves in the semiconductor industry, with its global market size growing at 71.3% from 2023 to 2031. Through heterogeneous integration of multiple components of different nodes and technologies, design teams are reinvigorating Moore’s law and paving the way for designs featuring multi-billion transistors and hundreds of IP blocks. These chiplet-based designs are a... » read more

Unlocking Efficiency: The Power Of IP Blocks In Silicon Chip Design


The fastest, most efficient and cost-effective way to design silicon is by leveraging intellectual property (IP) blocks. This methodology reduces risk, allows a design team to focus on its own differentiation, and allows scalability. Re-using existing IP offers even more value for design teams. But not every company has embraced the approach. Here’s why you should consider it. To optimize ... » read more

Importance Of Qualifying IP Revisions


Design intellectual property (IP) is the fundamental building block of the modern system on chip (SoC). As the scale and complexity of SoCs increases, usage of design IP blocks also increases rapidly, as they enable modularization and re-use of design components. As a result, the usage of design IP has grown rapidly in the past decade. An IP data library consists of many views and formats, w... » read more

Growing System Complexity Drives More IP Reuse


IP reuse of both third-party and internal IP is growing, but it's also becoming more complex to manage. There is more IP being used, and more systems into which it needs to be integrated, combined with other IP, and tracked throughout an organization. In some cases, this is an economic requirement. In others, designs are so complex that engineering teams need to focus on where they will make... » read more

Chip Design Teams And Restaurant Kitchen Staff Have A Lot In Common


By Anagha Pandharpurkar Believe it or not, electronic device and systems-design teams have a lot in common with kitchen staff in big commercial restaurants: They both leverage many different tools and resources to churn out great products in a high-pressure environment to a demanding audience that wants it now, not tomorrow. Unfortunately, design teams are often not nearly as well equippe... » read more

Maximize The Value Of Your 3rd Party IP Investment


The need to get to market sooner has resulted in significant growth in the use of 3rd party IP. This in turn has led to a growth in IP vendors. While licensing 3rd party IP may lead to reducing the development effort and time, it can potentially be costly and bring upon significant risk. Of course, there is the obvious cost of licensing the IP itself, but there are several other hidden costs... » read more

Tracking Re-Use Of Design IPs


Design teams have a great incentive to create design blocks or IPs that can be reused: Each time an IP is successfully reused, precious time is saved from project schedule. Of course, as easy as it sounds, achieving this goal in real life is not simple. In reality, the observation is that design libraries cannot be used as-is by multiple projects. Consider this scenario: A smart new graduate... » read more

SOC Design & IP Management—A Must For Functional Verification


As a part of the verification flow, verification teams perform different types of simulations based on the nature of the design. The simulations include digital logic functional simulations, mixed-signal functional simulations, power-aware simulations, formal verification runs and gate-level simulations. For a signoff, all planned tests must pass in all four types of simulations. In addition t... » read more

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