coming event

Maojet Tech Symposium
 Ambassador Hotel
Hsinchu, Taiwan
August 8, 2008

Q&A

What's an integration test bench?
Most IP companies deliver some kind of test bench with their IP. Too often though it is just the original development test bench, which is of little value to the customer who wishes to simply integrate the purchased IP into their chip. IPextreme has adopted the philosophy of delivering an Integration Test Bench that is specifically created to become part of the chip-level test bench and includes deliverables associated with integration.

These deliverables are typically bus models and test suites that users can run with their chip-level test bench to verify that the IP has been properly configured, instantiated and connected-up in their design. All the interfaces and basic functions have "Hello World!" type test to give the integrator confidence they are correctly using the IP.

What does "silicon-proven" really mean?
The true measure of IP maturity is how many times exact RTL code has seen production silicon and the more the better. IP that is working in FPGA has reached the first level of proof, and this is often the case with IP of a new standard. IP that is demonstrated on a foundry process shows that the IP is functional and what the timing/area/power characteristics are. IP that has been demonstrated in multiple processes, in significant production quantity, is the safest. IP buyers should assess these factors when making their buying decisions.

Why do IP companies charge royalties?
Royalties are a way that IP companies can offer buyers lower prices and share on the upside when the customer's product becomes successful. IP is increasingly part of a healthy semiconductor market and royalties help IP providers remain stable and continue to invest in providing IP valuable for their customer’s business. Without royalties the IP providers would have to charge much more up front to cover their development costs.

What is an IP subsystem?
Bryan Lewis, an analyst for Gartner Dataquest defines a 2nd generation System-on-Chip (SoC) as a collection of independent subsystems each running their own application on separate microprocessors and all tied together at the system level.

Increasingly, these subsystems are delivered as IP. An example of this is the IPextreme XBlue Bluetooth Baseband, which contains an embedded microprocessor running all of the real-time functions associated with keeping a Bluetooth link alive. This allows the SoC to be partitioned cleanly for parallel development and better reliability by distributing the complexity of the design across semi-autonomous subsystems. SoC developers are embracing multi-CPU systems as a way to avoid messy software integration, especially in real-time environments.