LeonardoSpectrum users license the Inventra IPX suite for a $5,500 yearly subscription and get access to 12 silicon-proven soft cores through the tool, said Sheri Andrew, product-marketing manager at the Inventra business unit.

Intellectual property "has a mixed reputation with respect to the business side of things-it's perceived as complicated on several levels-and we are trying to make it easy for users to get access to quality IP," said Andrew. "The cores we are offering in the IPX suite are ones that have been very popular with programmable-logic designers."

The IPX suite currently comprises 12 cores, and more may be added. "We are looking at putting together a portfolio of basic building blocks for communications, electronic data processing and consumer [apps]," Andrew said.

Initially, Inventra will offer the IPX suite in Altera encrypted netlist form. That makes it a protected IP flow between Mentor's LeonardoSpectrum synthesis tool and Altera's Quartus II place and route development software. It also ensures that users will not tamper with the soft IP.

"Encrypted IP allows IP vendors to reduce the support cost and the concern over getting up to speed on understanding and reading someone's source code," said Craig Lytle, vice president of the intellectual property business unit of Altera. "When you get a core encrypted, it is a known-good entity that does a specific function and speeds the design. Because it is encrypted, it allows IP vendors to not worry about supporting their IP, and that keeps costs down."

Lytle said that the cores have particular interest to those designers programming with Altera's Excalibur line of processor-based programmable logic devices (PLDs). "Once you have a processor, your interest in having a peripheral core that will connect to the processor rises," he said.

Lytle claimed that processor-based PLDs, are drawing new users to Altera. "We are seeing users accustomed to using processors or a combination of processors and programmable logic devices. We are also seeing interest from software design engineers reaching into the hardware design space. These designers don't know or can't design their own controllers and peripherals but would like to tie them together with some tools. These guys are really interested in plug-and-play, and that is what these encrypted cores offer."

Andrew said the Inventra group plans to offer IPX with other programmable-logic vendors in the future.

With the tool, users give a single command ,and LeonardoSpectrum optimizes an encrypted Inventra IPX core. The tool then produces a netlist that is imported automatically into Quartus II software for placement into the programmable-logic device design.

The suite contains tool-specific representation of the 12 Inventra cores, encrypted VHDL and Verilog RTL code, and compiled simulation models. The representations work "optimally" with ModelSim simulation, LeonardoSpectrum synthesis and Altera Quartus II software place and route. The company offers the suite as a front-end option to LeonardoSpectrum. See www.mentor.com/inventra/ipx.