Design IP has played a pivotal role in the creation of today’s complex SoC, but that role keeps changing. Each change places new demands on IP suppliers
Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering
June 9, 2022
The design IP industry is developing an assortment of new options and licensing schemes that could affect everything from how semiconductor companies collaborate to how ICs are designed, packaged, and brought to market.
The IP market already has witnessed a sweeping shift from a “design once, use everywhere” approach, to an “architect once, customize everywhere” model, in which IP is highly configurable and customizable and the focus is on domain-specific optimization. But as chips become increasingly complex, and as new types of IP and licensing models continue to gain ground — especially on the processor side with RISC-V — more changes are coming. The big question now is which of those changes will make a lasting impact, and who will be the winners and losers as a result.
Underlying all of this activity in the IP space, an increasing number of chip designs either have hit, or will hit, the reticle limit. So instead of packing more features and functions into a single SoC, chipmakers are breaking them apart into smaller components. The focus is now on disaggregation, and that makes the notion of standalone chiplets a real possibility. But whether that create a new market for pre-fabricated, off-the-shelf IP, or whether it conflicts with the requirement for increasing levels of optimization, is yet to be determined.
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In the software industry, open source led to a rapid increase in the number of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. This may be happening in the open-source hardware space, as well. “Open-source processor IP has brought revolutionary change across the IP industry,” says Bipul Talukdar, director of application engineering for SmartDV. “However, it is not as straightforward as it seems to pick an available RISC-V processor IP and integrate that into a design flow. There are challenges when it comes to taking care of the necessary plumbing, such as firmware, toolchains, and various integration aspects. This has brought forward a new business model based on open-source processor productization. This can be called ‘open-source processor productization as a service,’ which helps with productizing and benchmarking available processor cores for specific applications, and also extends the service to offer any co-processor or custom processor-based acceleration needs for specialized applications.”