Industry Expert Blogs

All good things must come to the an end (e.g., the beer during the weekend or the cash limit when your wife uses the credit card). And so it is with this All Programmable Planet miniseries on what to look for when selecting third-party IP. Let me just thank you for your time spent reading my words. Thank you for not falling asleep while reading (you didn't, did you?), and, of course, thank you for your comments, which provided such excellent feedback.

After this longish "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" introduction, let's move forward. I made our 10th IP core directive "Do I know you?" because the IP market is not the same as it was 20 years ago. I remember when we launched Digital Core Design (DCD) in 1999. In those days, there were only a few large companies offering IP cores, along with a lot of one-man-show businesses that had only a few designs in their offerings. In this flat market, things were relatively easy for customers and suppliers. If you had a good, price-competitive design, you had a customer for it. If an IP vendor had low-quality designs, we all heard about it quickly.

What about today? First of all, we're all older. I feel like I was starting my company just yesterday, even though DCD will be celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2014. But the main difference, in my opinion, is that today's designers use far more nuanced judgments when deciding which IP cores to use.