As 2007 winds down, it surely will be known as a seminal year for the IP market. A record number of new IP companies were launched and major acquisitions continue to show the attractiveness of the IP business model. New EDA companies are forming focused on supporting the development of quality IP. It seems that as long as there will be chips, so will there be a demand for IP. Heading into the holiday season, I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to our customers and partners we’ve touched during the year. We look forward in 2008 to continue the IPextreme tradition of redefining the status quo in the IP marketplace and bring you new and exciting types of IP never before available.

President and CEO

Core Values Blog: Enable Your Dreams With IP
by Warren Savage, CEO

Warren introduces us to Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture," an incredibly touching and inspiring video from a remarkable engineer, educator, and human being, who is living with pancreatic cancer. Pausch's message is to value what is truly important in life, to do what it takes to realize your own dreams, and the importance of helping others to do the same. Warren invites engineers to consider what can easily be forgotten; their tremendous value to society in helping others realize their vision - by using their engineering skills to enable others to bring their dreams to reality.

Read Warren's Blog

Motorola's Multiple Reference Clock Generator

The Wireless and Solutions Research team at Motorola Labs have developed a direct digital clock synthesis technology called the Multiple Reference Clock Generator (MRCG). The MRCG can replace multiple analog PLL's with a pure digital implementation capable of producing clocks from 2-1000 megahertz. Based on proprietary advances in Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) research, the MRCG is an ideal solution for clock generation in SoC designs that require multiple clock domains such as wireless baseband controllers.

The MRCG is now available as digital IP from IPextreme. The following White Paper explains the concept behind the MRCG and describes an on-chip clock generator implementation using the IP.

Click here to download the White Paper (registration required)

Collaboration Is The Key To Success
By Warren Savage, CEO

There is a saying that “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” In reality, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. There are myriad reasons for failures, but in our business, all successes have one thing in common: a close technical working relationship between customers and suppliers. Too often customers take a passive role in accepting inferior quality products from their suppliers, which contributes to failure.

It’s been my experience that suppliers relish the opportunity to have a collaborative relationship with their customers, as it provides them a better understanding of how to make their customers happy and satisfied. Customers appreciate suppliers who show a genuine interest in the problem they are trying to solve.

Too often we see IP and EDA companies with new products that were invented in a vacuum, with little customer input. This is like putting the cart before the horse. Design engineers at semiconductor companies need to take a more active role in driving their suppliers in the right direction if they hope to gain the efficiencies they need by buying IP and EDA products.

In the future, we will see more and more of this supplier-customer collaboration. Semiconductor companies possess the expertise and have an obligation to their shareholders to optimize their supply chain. In the end, this is how we will deliver complete products that achieve the ultimate objective of high quality at the lowest possible cost.

IP Distribution
By Michael Cizl, Director, Munich Design Center, IPextreme

As IP cores become increasingly complex, it is all the more important to make the implementation process for the IP integrator as easy and efficient as possible.

First of all, it is very important to provide a quality IP core that functions as expected in many different real-world applications – aka “silicon proven.” But anticipating the IP integrator’s needs and supporting them appropriately is equally important for the success and growth of any SoC company. To stumble here will decrease their profit because of higher NRE costs, due to higher design and support effort, and will lower the margins due to delayed market entry.

The first step towards successfully distributing and supporting an IP is to package the IP using high quality deliverables. For a synthesizable core, these can be divided into four types - code, documentation, a simulation environment and implementation scripts.

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Freescale Semiconductor and Continental Automotive have joined forces to design SPACE, a high-performance, multi-core microcontroller (MCU) optimized for electronic braking system (EBS) applications. The SPACE device integrates three e200 cores based on Power Architecture™ technology, making it the industry's first triple-core automotive MCU. Designed to double the performance of existing MCUs, the highly integrated SPACE device contains 3 MB of flash (one of the largest MCU-based flash arrays), 96 KB of SRAM, advanced FlexRay™ technology and Continental's unique fail-safe technology, which fulfills all requirements for Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL3) applications.