Editorial

Finding Winners and Losers in the Battle Over IP ASIC vendors are carefully looking at the business issues of IP. by Jonah McLeod

Semiconductor process technology that enables designers to build millions of gates on a piece of silicon is creating both opportunities and challenges for ASIC vendors. The challenge is coming from independent third-party vendors of reusable intellectual property (IP) in the form of cores and megacells: microprocessors, digital signal processors, and memory, as well as peripherals, such as PCI bus controllers.

With the advent of third-party IP vendors, designers are no longer bound to a single IC vendor. Engineers now have the option of incorporating cores from a variety of vendors into their larger system-on-a-chip designs and producing their systems at multiple fabs.

Foundry portability has an appeal to ASSP designers building next-generation PC and communications electronics. As a result, the ARM core has found some success in these designs. Semiconductor foundry suppliers such as TSMC Co. (Hsin-Chu, Taiwan) are exploiting this trend to take business from ASIC vendors.

ASIC vendors are able to offer a time-to-market advantage to designers who want to reuse a variety of IP. However, the problems associated with this are numerous.

On our Web site, virtualchipdesign.com, under the heading "Seminars," Mark Beal, vice president of engineering at Intrinsix Corp. (Westboro, MA), describes the design flow for an ADSL modem containing around 200 kgates. Within the design is a digital signal processor and memory hard macro both from Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas, TX) as well as a third-party RS232 soft core and algorithmic logic developed by Intrinsix.

Beal describes the unique set of design requirements that is inherent in designing with IP from different sources. Designers must deal with different timing and test domains for the different forms of IP contained in a system on a chip. Such system integration hurdles can delay time to market.

ASIC vendors help to minimize these problems by making their IP easier to integrate and by making more IP available. Garth Nash, vice president and director of world marketing technology at the semiconductor products sector of Motorola Inc. (Phoenix, AZ), said his company provides a wide variety of IP for telecom designers. These cores integrate with one another more easily than do cores from diverse vendors.

Like other IC vendors, Motorola has begun aggressively cross-licensing its IP to achieve the right mix of IP and to ensure it has a sufficient selection to entice designers to select Motorola as their foundry.

To further strengthen this strategy, Motorola and other IC vendors are adopting platform strategies that target high-volume end-applications such as the set-top box, the network computer, desktop multimedia, cellular phones, Internet data communications, telephones infrastructure (ISDN), etc.

Semiconductor vendors are developing a set of reusable cores and complete reference designs to build a set-top box or cellular phone, for example. In addition, they provide design services to help customers quickly design products with unique features.

The customer gets to shorten his or her time to market; the semiconductor vendor sells his or her intellectual property, silicon, and design services. This symbiotic relationship will be the norm for the near term, and it suggests that the semiconductor vendors will successfully stave off any competitive threat to their dominance.

Jonah McLeod is the editor-in-chief of Integrated System Design.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please e-mail your message to michael@asic.com.

integrated system design  June 1997