So you want to start an IP/VIP company? Don't.
I met up with two semiconductor industry friends recently. They were thinking of quitting their jobs and starting a company that would focus on Semiconductor IP. They wanted my advice on how they should go about doing it. Déjà vu! This wasn’t the first time someone had come to me with that idea. My advice was "Don't do it. Keep your job".
Entrepreneurs (and would-be entrepreneurs) expect support and encouragement. I could sense that my friends felt disappointed in me. So I gave them a glimpse of reality. In this post, I am summarizing the main reasons why I would advise bright engineers against starting companies that develop IP or VIP for open standards.
In fact, for 3 years, my company, Arrow Devices successfully developed and sold Verification IP (VIP) to some of the top 20 semiconductor companies. In mid-2015, we divested our VIP business to a top EDA Company for the same reasons I am summarizing below. (BTW, more on what we are doing now, later in this post)
Related Semiconductor IP
- nQrux® Root of Trust IP
- AXI to UCIe Bridge IP
- UCIe 2.x Controller IP
- SWI3S (SoundWire I3S Interface) Peripheral Controller Core IP
- OpenTitan-based RISC-V Secure Element
Related Blogs
- All you want to know about MIPI IP... don't be shy, just ask IPnest
- The Chart They Don't Want You To See
- Why thinking about software and security is so important right at the start of an ASIC design
- Want to Mix and Match Dies in a Single Package? UCIe Can Get You There
Latest Blogs
- From Bug Hunting to Engineering Methodology: Lessons from AI-Driven Development
- Manufacturing Intelligence: Turning EDA Data into Trusted Action
- Execute-in-Place: Getting More from Embedded NVM
- Rethinking RTL flows with AI-driven hybrid formal verification
- Arm and NVIDIA: Building the trusted compute foundation for the agentic AI era