Today, most designers think of a block of IP as a product said Naveed Sherwani, the CEO of Open Silicon. However, the IP should really be thought of as a service, he said, since there is often a need for continuing support from the supplier of the IP.

Unlike products that usually come with some type of guarantee regarding their functionality, IP licenses rarely come with a guarantee. Thus, the basic business model needs fixing, said Sherwani.

Anyone who has designed an SoC and has had a problem getting the chip to work due to IP that doesn't function as advertised knows the frustration of going back and forth between the IP vendors and the fabrication facility to determine where the fault lies, explained Sherwani.

But when a chip doesn't work, who pays? It all may depend on how well the IP is supported and what "guarantees" come with the IP said Jim Ensel, senior vice president of marketing at Virage Logic Corp. "Having a solid validation environment will help minimize the need to respin a design by catching problems before a design goes to fabrication."

Short of changing the business model, industry organizations such as the VSIA have defined a quality of IP (QIP) metric that will help IP vendors to provide a more-complete package of data to customers said Rick Tomihiro, the director of marketing for the IP division of Mentor Graphics Corp. "Such a metric will help reduce the cost of IP ownership by providing designers with associated information such as test benches, documentation, and other supporting information."

The QIP metric is a good starting point as a baseline of what IP suppliers should deliver added Mike Horne, IP and EDA alliance manager at Cadence Design Systems Inc. "Putting more quality into the starting deliverable should result in better success when the chips are fabricated," Horne said.

Relating to the issue of support for IP, an increase in the customer engagement to work closer with customers is one approach. However this adds to the overhead of the IP supplier and may force suppliers to increase their license fees to build in more support, said Sherwani. Providing more assurances can increase customer confidence when that customer has to select an IP supplier said Kurt Wolf, the senior director of library management at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC).

At the customer's companies, perhaps it is also time to have a chief IP officer suggested Wolf. "Most likely only the larger-size companies could afford that level of overhead, but with all the IP licenses struck for multiple SoC designs, having one central manager might make sense", explained Wolf.

In some cases, the IP vendors are starting to build walls, protecting themselves from potential legal actions said Bobby Wong, a program manager at IBM Corp. The companies are becoming lawyer driven, and that doesn't bode well for the industry explained Wong. If IP classified as a product, legal protections and liabilities could well require an army of lawyers. However, if viewed as a service, IP vendors, working closely with customers, could put many of the lawyers out of the picture and simplify the working relationship.