Saturday Apr. 28, 2007
The Departed II -- Stolen IP
I hated the Oscar-award winning film The Departed. Friends and family ask questions ranging somewhere between "why" and "what's wrong with you". Of course, nothing's wrong with me except I'm an engineer and can perhaps get distracted by the details. In the movie, Jack Nicholson plays a mobster who's infiltrated the police and FBI and can pretty much get away with trafficking contraband with immunity. One item he traffics is "microprocessor chips" (use your fingers like Dr. Evil for the right effect) sold to the Chinese in plastic 208 pin quad flat packs in a briefcase. Apparently Fry's was out of stock.
It seems the screenwriters haven't been paying much attention to the semiconductor industry's interest in selling as many chips to the Chinese market as they can. Instead they fell back into familiar bogey-man stereotypes from the Cold War era. Nonetheless, most IP companies are not yet so enthusiastic about letting their IP into China, especially in source code format.
As semiconductor industry sorts out the "new world order", one thing is clear--design is moving east and today, design means using IP. A lot has been written about selling IP to China and the dangers associated with cultures that might not respect the principles of ownership. The consensus in the IP community is that China is quickly moving in the right direction towards respect for protection of licensed IP, but still has a way to go. The feeling is that sooner or later China will have enough IP of its own that it will be concerned about Western companies stealing from them and there will be an "Aha! Moment." In the meantime, we are careful.
This transition period may serve a useful purpose for the industry. During DAC 2006, Synplicity put forth an innovative proposal to create an industry standard IP encryption technology that all of EDA could implement to permit a fully secure flow for designs that use IP. This would allow IP companies to deliver their IP as binaries with a key to customers that would allow EDA tools (and not the customer) to see the code and simulate and implement the IP as part of the design. Such a technology has long been the holy grail of the IP community which would simultaneously allow companies to protect IP and also develop new kinds of business models like subscription licensing which would provide more flexibility and lower costs for customers. The proposal has been provided to VSIA for standardization which is chartered with driving its adoption across the EDA community. I'm hopeful that something useful pops out of this effort.
In the meantime, we must stick with legal contracts, secure design centers, watermarking, and other "trust but verify" methods. Even if the EDA industry comes through with the encryption technology we all need, I'm sure Hollywood will also be slow to pick up on the news and we'll surely see a movie sequel with mobsters passing a briefcase of "RTL Source Code" printed on green and white fan-fold paper.
Posted by Warren Savage on Saturday Apr. 28, 2007
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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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