On Cores
Meditations on the semiconductor and IP industries
By Warren Savage, CEO, IPextreme
Tuesday Oct. 23, 2007
Enable Your Dreams with IP
Actually I was long torn between being and engineer and a musician. After doing both for brief time, I realized three important lessons:
• Engineers make more money than musicians
• My circuits were better than my songs
• That designing a circuit gave the same kind of creative satisfaction as writing and performing
In those early days of my career, hardware design was a real man’s game. We designed big boxes with loud fans that roared as if boasting of its impressiveness. Then came ASICs where all of sudden your innovation was miniaturized into something only an inch across. Today, chips are disappearing altogether and the real design work is in IP— making chips and systems are simply manufacturing steps.
The focus of an engineer today is either in creating IP, or assembling others IP into dream fulfilling subsystems. The power and influence of the engineer simply keeps expanding, being able to create larger and larger works from the work of others.
Over the weekend I was watching a video of Dr. Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.Randy’s last lecture at CMU and was around the theme of achieving your childhood dreams (and more) You can find the link to the video at the following link: Last Lecture
You see Randy is dying. The lecture was his last and he used it to share his reflections on his own life in the presentation that was roughly composed of three sections:
• Having dreams
• Achieving those dreams
• Enabling other people’s dreams
As IP is never too far from my mind, it struck me that those of us in the IP industry are really in the dream realization business. Our work makes other people’s dreams come true. Our customers are the ones with the creative ideas of how to cobble together dozens of cores to form new types of systems that only existed in their minds eye.
What a wonderful job we have.
Posted by Warren Savage on Tuesday Oct. 23, 2007
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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.
You see Randy is dying. The lecture was his last and he used it to share his reflections on his own life in the presentation that was roughly composed of three sections:
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.
