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On Cores
Meditations on the semiconductor and IP industries
By Warren Savage, CEO, IPextreme



Tuesday Apr. 10, 2007

Welcome to the Future - Start Running

I would highly recommend to every single person living in the western world to read Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat - A Brief History of the 21st Century. No other text I've read in the last ten years has scared the hell out of me like this little tome.


Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve.
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.

Friedman's book is essentially about the acceleration of competition and the emergence of India and China to take center stage in the 21st century. We see every major high tech company with a presence in these places. Universities are competing with centuries old institutions in the West for the minds which will dominate the decades to come. My son has a friend (with Indian parents) whom plans to return to India to attend the IIT rather than MIT.

But the West has a secret weapon it sometimes forgets about. We've got IP. Lots of it. And that IP gives us a very valuable thing--a head start. Let's take a look at what's going on in semiconductor today:

• 60% of a modern SoC is comprised of IP from other companies
• Fabs are increasingly non-differentiated and compete solely on cost
• IDMs are differentiated by their system level knowledge and use of IP

The fact that IP and system level expertise are the critical success factors in semiconductor means that the West has maybe a 10 year head start over its faster, more agile, hungrier rivals in the East. The question is whether that gap will be narrowed or widened as the next decade plays out.



Posted by Warren Savage on Tuesday Apr. 10, 2007 | Add a Comment



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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.