IP Business Should Learn from EDA's Playbook

Dylan McGrath, Contributing Editor, EETimes
6/15/2016 04:25 PM EDT

Industry veteran sees parallels between IP's opportunity, EDA's rise.

Don’t try to tell Charlie Janac that the electronic design automation and semiconductor intellectual property businesses are branches of the same tree. Janac, who is more than 30 years into a career spanning both disciplines, believes that while the histories of EDA and IP are intertwined, they are not the same.

”I will maintain until my dying day that IP and EDA are very different,” Janac told EE Times in a recent interview. “There’s a huge difference between helping someone do a chip and actually being in the chip.”

But Janac, president and CEO of interconnect IP supplier Arteris Inc., does see parallels between the current state of the IP business and where EDA was 30 years ago. Back then, the vast majority of EDA tools were proprietary solutions created by the semiconductor companies that used them. And just as chip vendors eventually all but abandoned homegrown tools in favor of commercial offerings, Janac believes that they will ultimately cobble together SoCs from mostly commercial IP with a bit of “secret sauce” thrown in for differentiation.

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