Industry Expert Blogs

Given their complexity, the vast majority of today’s SoC designs contain a high number of third party IP components. These can be developed outside the company or by another division of the same company. In general they present the same type of obstacle to easy integration and require a model or multiple types of models in order to minimize the integration cost in the final design.

Generally one thinks of models when talking about verification, but in fact as Frank Schirrmeister, Product Marketing Group Director at Cadence reminded me, there are three major purposes for modeling IP cores. Each purpose requires different models. In fact, Bernard Murphy, Chief Technology Officer at Atrenta identified even more uses of models during our interview.

Frank Schirrmeister listed performance analysis, functional verification, and software development support as the three major uses of IP models.