IP business booming for big companies only

IP business booming for big companies only
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
February 14, 2000 (11:49 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000214S0038

The third-party IP industry is alive and growing but is lucrative only for a handful of companies, a market analyst told a meeting of the IP trade group Rapid this week.

Dataquest IP analyst Jordan Selburn said the third-party IP industry grew from $250 million in 1998 to $350 million in 1999, but the lion's share of IP industry revenue continues to be owned by "proprietary" or high-value IP companies, with ARM and MIPS combined dominating more than half the revenues.

In his speech, Selburn said there are also a growing number of players in the IP market but that the six companies-ARM, MIPS, Rambus, inSilicon (formerly the Virtual Chips division of Phoenix), DSP Group and Artisan continue to account for 90 percent of third-party IP revenues.

Selburn, who separates the IP industry into proprietary and standards-based IP areas, said the standards-based IP market is already spoken for.

"In the standards-based IP market you h ave low barrier to entry and limited prices but the costs of being in this market are fairly high," he said. "You have to have a distribution channel and support in place. We really feel there are going to be one, two or three dominant players in these areas."

Selburn said the proprietary IP area will continue to see competition among the established players but that new companies providing new architectures will have a hard time competing in the market.

"If you are going to offer a new 32-bit microprocessor, there better be a very compelling reason why people should change from the processor and architecture they are currently using to yours," said Selburn.

Selburn also noted that the established microprocessor core vendors now offer broader product lines that have made it more compelling for users to stick to one vendor.