Industry Expert Blogs

For the last few weeks I've been wondering whether the topic of silicon-proven IP cores would be interesting to you. And then, just when I was about to write to Max to suggest that we should change the subject, I found Steve Leibson's Hello Planet blog.

Steve's thesis, and Moore's Law, told me that silicon-proven IP is a good topic to make you... happy? So here it is: Part 7 -- is your IP core silicon proven?

I bet that Gordon E. Moore and David House never assumed that their predictions would not only be accurate throughout the latter part of the 20th century but, with small deviations, would also be the semiconductor industry's "pass key" in the 21st century. As Steve noted, Moore's Law has taken us from 180nm design rules at the beginning of the millennium to 28nm design rules today.

At the same time, ASIC design costs have risen from a few million dollars to several tens of millions of dollars because of the complexity of the resulting integrated circuits (for the purposes of this column we will use the term ASIC to also embrace ASSPs and SoCs). So can we stop designing ASICs? Of course not. The latest and greatest FPGAs promise a Brave New World, but they can’t handle everything, so the need for ASICs remains.

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