Changing The IP Supplier Paradigm

Brian Bailey, SemiEngineering
August 7th, 2014

Experts at the table: As the industry migrates from small blocks to larger integrated blocks and subsystems, it is having an impact on IP companies.

Just a few years ago, the Intellectual Property (IP) business consisted of small blocks being sold by small companies and an almost over the wall delivery mechanism. The industry quickly realized the problems with this supply chain and the IP business went through very rapid change. At the same time, the average size of the IP blocks has increased and today, what we think of as IP, used to be the whole chip when the IP market was first born. We are beginning to see more changes in the IP supply chain.

Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Rich Wawrzyniak, senior market analyst for ASIC and SoC at Semico Research; John Koeter, vice president of marketing for the Solutions Group at Synopsys; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing for eSilicon; Peter McGuinness, director of technology marketing at Imagination Technologies; and Michael Mostovoy, senior director for ASIC development at SanDisk Corporation. What follows are excerpts from that conversation. Certain members of the panel also wanted to point out that the comments belong to them and may not represent the views of the company they work for.