It’s clear that designers of complex SoCs need to become better acquainted with IP products and the IP industry if they want to produce competitive products. Fortunately for them, there have been several forums available to learn more about IP and how it can help SoC design (see Sonics’ last blog entry). Last week, I was fortunate enough to participate in another IP event, the first Constellations seminar in Santa Clara hosted by IPextreme.
For those who may not be aware, Constellations is a marketing and sales effort of many different semiconductor IP companies joining together to get their messages to the market and generate customer interest.
These companies, representing a broad range of differentiated IP, presented the audience with information about their IP products. Panels on business and technical issues followed.
The business panel, chaired by IPextreme’s Warren Savage, highlighted the importance for customers and IP providers, to have straightforward conversations about key business issues with the goal of getting a contract defined and in place.
While I don’t ever imagine having a one-size-fits-all contract, being able to present business issues candidly and quickly, during the negotiation process, can result in a faster deal that is agreeable to both the customer and IP provider. As IP becomes more complex, we, as leaders in this industry, should continually strive to simplify business deals for everyone’s benefit.
The technical panel, chaired by Ron Wilson of EDN Magazine, focused on differing perspectives and assumptions about how to use IP within complex SoC systems. Reuse, integration, and standardization were all discussed. Of course, these are issues that we at Sonics support and have become part of our marketing mantra.
For me, the key take-away of the day was the discussion about the importance of making the customer successful. Early in my career, I learned that taking care of customers and ensuring they were successful was the answer to any repeat business. That is certainly the case for IP and managing a long-term relationship between IP supplier and customer.
Another highlight of the seminar was IPextreme’s demonstration of how quickly and easily it is to combine IP using SNAP in a simple SoC configuration using an Altera Cyclone III FPGA system. The simple demonstration included a Coldfire V1 processor and five peripheral blocks that were connected using SNAP (Sonic Network for AMBA Protocol) product to build the interconnect. The entire design was less than 65K gates. I was pleased to hear about the excellent experience of the IPextreme engineers. SNAP enable a fast design cycle as it only took three days from the start of the evaluation to a working FPGA for demonstration at the seminar. SNAP reduced to days what would have taken the engineers several months using their existing technology. AND, the gate count with SNAP was actually 10 percent smaller than that of their internal technology. So, for simple to complex SoC designs, it is in the best interest of SoC teams to look at the latest IP technology to reduce both execution time and cost.
All in all, the conference was a great chance to get together with folks in the industry, share stories, and talk about how to enable customers to win in these tough times. My presentation from the conference is embedded below so take a look. Comments? Questions? Just let me know.
Now off to Israel for this weeks Design and Reuse IP SOC conference in Tel Aviv.
Jack Browne
VP of Sales & Marketing at Sonics, Inc.
twitter.com/Jackb650
Tags: amba, conference, economy, EDA, Industry, IP, semiconductor, SoC, sonics