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BillM2
After today's announcment from Apple conference, there should be no questions ...
DAC panel spotlights rise of IP subsystems
Dylan McGrath
6/7/2012 1:41 AM EDT
SAN FRANCISCO—Intellectual property (IP) reuse in SoC design is increasing, creating challenges in compatibility and complexity, according to executives on a Design Automation Conference (DAC) panel. To minimize this complexity, panelists said, the semiconductor industry will increasingly turn to IP subsystems—larger chunks of IP that have been stitched together from many smaller blocks and pre-verified to ensure performance.
Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of chip design and manufacturing services provider Open-Silicon Inc., said he was happy to see that IP reuse was finally occurring on a large scale, but said the trend is creating challenges. Open-Silicon recently completed an SoC for a customer in which 60 percent of the silicon real estate was taken up by IP, including more than 100 different blocks from 16 different vendors, Sherwani said. He predicted that within two to three years some SoCs would be comprised of more than 80 percent reused IP.
"We should move away from just IPs to the direction of IP subsystems," Sherwani sad. "That is a very exciting area that I think you will see mature in the next two to three years."
John Koeter, vice president of marketing for Synopsys Inc.'s Solutions group, noted that Synopsys earlier this year introduced its first IP subsystem, the DesignWare SoundWave Audio Subsystem. The product, rolled out in March, includes pre-verified hardware and software to reduce design and integration effort, decrease design risk and accelerate time-to-market, according to Synopsys. Koeter said the subsystem includes configurable processing cores and interfaces and comes with more than 500,000 lines of software ported on top of it.
"I think this is really what the future of IP is," Koeter said.
Panelists from left: John Koeter of Synopsys, Kevin Meyer of Globalfoundries and Naveed Sherwani of Open-Silicon. Moderator Ron Wilson (right) is editor-in-chief at Altera.
Kevin Meyer, vice president of design enablement strategy and alliances at Globalfoundries Inc., said his firm has been working together with its partners in the Common Platform Alliance for more than four years to explore the concept of IP subsystems. "We do see the value of how that can get customers more quickly into a manufacturing relationship with us," Meyer said.
But Meyer said the concept could work only if aggregation of the subsystems is much more optimized than it is currently. The creation of the subsystems also needs to be done in close collaboration with key partners, he said.
Momentum for IP subsystems has been growing for the past couple of years. In 2010, Rich Wawrzyniak, an analyst with Semico Research Corp., authored a report on the emergence of IP subsystems in 2010. Wawrzyniak concluded that if subsystems are well thought out, implemented correctly by suppliers and embraced by users, tangible gains could be made in design productivity, device performance and system-level performance, while also mitigating design costs to some degree.
Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of chip design and manufacturing services provider Open-Silicon Inc., said he was happy to see that IP reuse was finally occurring on a large scale, but said the trend is creating challenges. Open-Silicon recently completed an SoC for a customer in which 60 percent of the silicon real estate was taken up by IP, including more than 100 different blocks from 16 different vendors, Sherwani said. He predicted that within two to three years some SoCs would be comprised of more than 80 percent reused IP.
"We should move away from just IPs to the direction of IP subsystems," Sherwani sad. "That is a very exciting area that I think you will see mature in the next two to three years."
John Koeter, vice president of marketing for Synopsys Inc.'s Solutions group, noted that Synopsys earlier this year introduced its first IP subsystem, the DesignWare SoundWave Audio Subsystem. The product, rolled out in March, includes pre-verified hardware and software to reduce design and integration effort, decrease design risk and accelerate time-to-market, according to Synopsys. Koeter said the subsystem includes configurable processing cores and interfaces and comes with more than 500,000 lines of software ported on top of it.
"I think this is really what the future of IP is," Koeter said.
Panelists from left: John Koeter of Synopsys, Kevin Meyer of Globalfoundries and Naveed Sherwani of Open-Silicon. Moderator Ron Wilson (right) is editor-in-chief at Altera.
Kevin Meyer, vice president of design enablement strategy and alliances at Globalfoundries Inc., said his firm has been working together with its partners in the Common Platform Alliance for more than four years to explore the concept of IP subsystems. "We do see the value of how that can get customers more quickly into a manufacturing relationship with us," Meyer said.
But Meyer said the concept could work only if aggregation of the subsystems is much more optimized than it is currently. The creation of the subsystems also needs to be done in close collaboration with key partners, he said.
Momentum for IP subsystems has been growing for the past couple of years. In 2010, Rich Wawrzyniak, an analyst with Semico Research Corp., authored a report on the emergence of IP subsystems in 2010. Wawrzyniak concluded that if subsystems are well thought out, implemented correctly by suppliers and embraced by users, tangible gains could be made in design productivity, device performance and system-level performance, while also mitigating design costs to some degree.
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BillM2
6/11/2012 4:12 PM EDT
After today's announcment from Apple conference, there should be no questions whether IP subsystems can be successful. Apple has created one subsystem/ecosystem that many will envy: a HW (standard) platform that is supported by App Store that has 400,000,000 registered credit card users (one click purchase) and 650,000 applications that can be quickly purchased/downloaded and used. Proven by users purchasing 30B applications that customize their HW (iPhones/iPads) to a user's specific needs via SW. Just a question how large you view the solution...
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