In the past two years, a number of consortia have formed to address the knotty problems of acquiring and combining, on the same chip, reusable intellectual-property (IP) circuit blocks that come from different sources. The Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) alliance set up shop in September 1996, chartered to endorse standards to ease the burden of interfacing reusable IP blocks. The IP industry's trade organization, Rapid, wants to make its online catalog of third-party IP the most comprehensive source of its kind. Finally, the Virtual Component Exchange (VCX), formally unveiled just six weeks ago, plans to create an infrastructure that speeds negotiations between IP providers and users. All these groups report progress, but the hype that often surrounds it must be tempered by a dose of reality.
Namely, the amount of IP chip-design teams acquire from outside sources will be relatively small, at least for a couple of years. Consider that on average about 30 percent of a chip's circuitry is reused circuitry; 70 percent is newly developed. The reused circuitry comes from either an internally or externally created prior design. In fact, an average of 12 percent of the reused circuitry comes from outside sources like commercial IP vendors, strategic partners and so on. The remainder, 88 percent, comes from sources inside the chip-design team's company. This data comes from studying more than 200 IC and ASIC design projects in late 1997 in both the semiconductor and systems industries. Thus, on average, outside parties supply only 3.6 percent of a chip's overall circuitry (12 percent of 30 percent). This is tiny. Of course, one reason for such a low figure is the difficulty of mixing and matching IP from different sources. Proponents of VSI, Rapid and VCX would argue that this is exactly the reason for their existence.
When we project out over the next 12 months, the situation is likely to change, but not by much. These same design teams indicate that the amount of externally sourced IP they plan to use will grow from 12 to 18 percent. The amount of reused circuitry on-chip will grow from 30 to 46 percent of the chip's overall circuitry. Thus, on average, the amount of externally sourced IP on a chip will grow to 8.3 percent of the entire chip's circuitry (18 percent of 46 percent). Relatively speaking, 8.3 percent is still quite small. Think about it: More than 90 percent will still come from internal sources. The implications are important.
— Ronald Collett is president of Collett International Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), a management consulting firm. He can be reached at ronc@collett.com.
