Industry Expert Blogs

Last week I talked about what IP is, and why it’s important. (Click here for a quick review!) This week, after being inspired by a Whiteboard Wednesday given by Tom Hackett, I thought I’d talk about what really matters when selecting IP for your design.

When you first ask this question of chip designers, three letters spring to mind: P, P, and A — power, performance, and area. You want a design that doesn’t take a lot of power to run, you want it to run well, and you want it not to take up too much space on your chip. The answer to this question hasn’t changed since the beginning of system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. When a company like Cadence develops IP for an SoC design, PPA is the first thing to take into consideration, and always will be. But there are more questions that should come to mind.

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