Wednesday Jan. 02, 2008
Goodbye 2007 -- Hello 2008
2007 went out with a bang with the IP’07 show in Grenoble, France. Marking the 10th anniversary of the show, Madame Saucier once again put on show with an eclectic mix of IP suppliers, their EDA suppliers, and a healthy dose of input from the academic world on the topic of design reuse. I was privileged to lead a very engaging panel session on the topic of IP standards with the help of industry luminaries Bill Martin, Ian Mackintosh, Pierre Bricaud, Victor Berman, and rounded out with Jacques Galbrun of ST providing a large company insider’s viewpoint. If you weren’t there, you missed it.
 Looking back over 2007 we’ve seen quite a lot of interesting and positive news about the IP business in the last year. In August we saw the acquisition of leading analog IP company Chipidea S.A. by microprocessor powerhouse MIPS Inc. The $147M price tag worked out to be nearly 4.7 times sales, a sweet multiple that demonstrates the entire IP space as one that is here to stay. Furthermore, the acquisition of a Portuguese company by a true Silicon Valley legend is more evidence that the IP business is an increasingly international affair.
Also over the summer we saw a bit of drama play out in the press when Mark Lapedus called the whole IP industry out to defend why anyone should care about IP. (see "Opinion: Semi IP sector is a lost cause") It seemed the whole IP industry rushed to the answer that question with a deluge of protesting letters. (see “The Semi IP Debate”) Is the jury in?
So looking forward to 2008, what topics might we see come into the spotlight for discussion. Here’s a few that come to mind:
• Is the industry settled into a comfortable business model for IP, or are stacking royalties finally going to become a problem that forces a course correction for the whole semiconductor industry?
• Has IP quality finally reached a point of maturity? It seems like a very long time since I’ve heard a lot of public outcry about IP quality needing to be better.
• Are there new kinds of IP and IP companies that are on the horizon for applications in sub-65nm designs?
• Will we see an acceleration of platform-based design using prefab IP subsystems?
• Will we see a slow-down in the adoption of the new smaller geometries because of the lack of ported IP?
Also, I am always looking for new idea for things to talk about in this column, so if you have a topic you’d like me to bring into the public discussion, please feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll do my best to try to get it aired here.
Posted by Warren Savage on Wednesday Jan. 02, 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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