Digital Still Camera:

IP Kit Due DIligence & Sourcing Methodology

Silicon-IP, Inc. is a company of experts with well over a 100 engineering years implementing IP sourcing at the largest foundries, fabless and IDM SoC companies. We act as an extension of your SoC design team and can either complete the entire process for you or provide on-demand resources to help you complete the task.

So your Silicon SoC design team needs a USB PHY for your Digital Still Camera chip, how many IPs do you need to evaluate and how do you determine the best practice methodology to ranking best fit? First begin by searching for IP on ChipEstimate.com and Design & Resuse.

There you will find more than 400 and 300 IPs respectively from 9 foundries. Then you need to find an HDMI PHY ( ~ 300) on a matching foundry process and a 12-/14-bit ADC (~150), timing PLLs (horizontal & vertical), DC/DC convertors, and LP-DDR (> 500 entries).  That’s just to get started. Now you have to arrange the set of IP by foundry & process combinations to determine how many complete IP kits to evaluate. Next you begin to compare specs, verify data claims, and compare silicon validation reports from each vendor for each IP on each process. And then….

But why spend all that time and energy on an activity that does not enable your company to charge any extra money for your product when you can get someone else to do it for you. Silicon-IP, Inc. is a company of experts with well over a 100 engineering years implementing IP sourcing at the largest foundries, fabless and IDM SoC companies. We act as an extension of your SoC design team and can either complete the entire process for you or provide on-demand resources to help you complete the task.

The Silicon-IP team has either already completed the IP Kit analysis or is in-progress as they build out the inventory of IP Kits application by application. The benefit is big for smaller SoC teams that only go through the IP evaluation process once a year. Comparatively, the Silicon-IP team runs through their documented five-step due diligence procedure on a weekly basis.

The benefit for SoC designers and IP providers is a repeatable, structured business process that successfully reduces the time and cost associated with licensing 3rd party silicon IP.

 

Five-step Due Diligence Procedure

  • IP Provider & IP Evaluation
  • Technical Analysis
  • Quality Audit & Foundry Metrics    
  • Customer Reference & Foundry Statistics
  • Commercial Trade-off Analysis

 

By outsourcing, even the smallest or newest design teams now have access to the same or better knowledge, insight, and implementation skills used by the largest semiconductor companies.  An additional benefit is that you take advantage of 3rd party experts without the expensive cost of a dedicated, full-time team of technical and business professionals.  But the greatest benefit is that silicon design teams focus their core competencies like a laser on HW/SW integration and not the highly replicated, standard operational procedure of IP procurement.   

Design teams increasingly rely on 3rd party IP to both support their own value-added design and enable their chip to interface with the system functions. The acquisition and management of 3rd party IP by Silicon-IP enables the great ideas still in the hands of SoC design teams to hit their market window earlier, with higher quality of results, and more cost effectively than if they had to go it alone.