THE IP MARKET

The IP market

Several requirements are creating a new market for IP: the increase in time to market pressures; increased design technology and complexity; and quickly evolving standards in many markets such as wireless. All of these drive the necessity to re-use IP, designs, and proven design methodologies.

Eric Chen, senior analyst at J.P. Morgan H&Q, noted that IP company growth has far outpaced that of semiconductor vendors since 1996. He said that the silicon IP business grew 36 percent between 1998 and 1999, and that "emerging companies" in the IP sector grew by as much as 150 percent. Chen further identifies "Domain" IP as a new business model in which companies don't provide product-specific cores. Instead, they focus on a challenging technology area, like mixed-signal design, and provide customizable application-specific solutions - in effect, platform-based SoCs - that may comprise a number of IP blocks. The advantage, Chen said, is the ability to address many different, but related, markets.

Dolphin Technology

For designers who need standard or custom IP such as Custom Memory (CAM, TLB, Register Files) and Memory Compilers (Single-port SRAM, Dual-port SRAM, ROM and Register Files), Specialty, High Speed and Standard I/O designs, High Speed Standard Cell and Data Path cell/Blocks for DSP applications Dolphin Technology is clearly the best source. Dolphin Technology delivers quality, high-performance, fab-verified silicon-IP at a fraction of the time and cost of in-house development.