Monday Oct. 01, 2007
Power to the People
Last week about 400 people from around the world descended upon Austin, Texas for the first annual Power Architecture Developers Conference. It was a remarkable two days of seeing competitors lay down their weapons to come together for the nerd equivalent of the Summer of Love.
 As I’ve mentioned in this space on several occasions, the future of the semiconductor business will require collaboration and healthy ecosystems. I participated in two panels.
My 1st panel consisted of representatives from IBM and Freescale, the primary backers of the Power Architecture along with people from AMCC, PA Semi, and IPextreme (my company, focused on semiconductor IP licensing.) Speaker after speaker talked openly about their products and their roadmaps-- all from the point of view of the customer. Certainly all these companies had business interests to present, but I was struck by the tone of civility and togetherness of the attendees and exhibitors as if they felt they were part of something special.
My 2nd panel consisted of chairs of the technical working groups within the Power.org organization. Here we had people from different companies participating in establishing the direction and focus of the organization itself. The chairs openly explained how their working groups worked, what they were working on, and asked for help from the member companies to participate to drive the Power.org forward.
My impression of Power.org after nearly 2 years of membership is that it’s a bit of an experiment. It’s an unprecedented business experiment, bringing an entire ecosystem of companies together in a democratic and cooperative framework to pound out the roadmap for the future and rally everyone around something they see as important to winning customers. That’s not the usual way these things work. The usual way is that you have companies battling each other to the death until someone “wins” and someone “loses”. Good technology, the good of the customer is sometimes lost in the open competition of the free market. Sometimes the combatants so damage themselves they leave open the market for a latecomer to come in and take all the money.
At work here may be a new business phenomena called “crowdsourcing”. Rather than traditional outsourcing or insourcing methods for getting things done, in crowdsourcing the collective wisdom of the group is tapped to arrive at the best solution at the best price. In the future, this might be the only economically practical way to get big things done.
Power.org is still in its infancy as the organization to promote and drive the Power Architecture into the future. It’s playing the game differently and it will be interesting to see whether it is setting the example for the way ecosystems are established or like the Summer of Love, be an idea that couldn’t last.
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Goodbye 2007 -- Hello 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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