John Koeter, Vice President, Marketing, Synopsys Solution Group

The marketplace for semiconductor IP (SIP) continues to grow at double digit rates. According to Gartner Dataquest, the SIP market will reach $2.3B in 2014. IBS and Semico believe that the market will be over $3B in 2014. What is driving this growth? What are the major trends that we see in IP?

The primary trends driving the increased usage of semiconductor IP are:

• Expense control: It is often less expensive for companies to buy third party IP than to develop it themselves. This is particularly true in advanced nodes where the complexity of IP development increases rapidly with increasing data rates and shrinking geometries. As an example, our estimate is that USB 3.0 is roughly 15 to 20 times more complex to design and verify than USB 2.0
• Core versus Context: Just because it is difficult doesn’t mean that it is differentiating. Interfaces like USB have to work but they don’t generally differentiate the SoC. As an IP vendor, we see many different applications spaces for our IP and we have to ensure that IP works over a broad range of configurations and products
• Consumer-driven schedules: Shorter time-to-market and more features means that designers need to de-risk schedules with proven solutions
• Fab outsourcing: More outsourcing of manufacturing means more opportunity for customers to use off-the-shelf IP to meet their design requirements and more demand for IP vendors to create IP with the requisite investment in quality.

Now that we’ve addressed some of the trends driving the increasing usage of semiconductor IP, what’s next? How will the IP market evolve over the next several years? At Synopsys, we believe that the semiconductor IP market will see significant shifts over the next five years including:

• Most SoCs will have about 70 to 80 percent of their functionality in reused IP (internal and/or third party). The majority of these IP blocks will be memories with thousands of instances per chip. This will mean that optimized memory will have a dramatic impact on the chip’s overall cost and power
• Individual IP products will yield to more complex IP subsystems. These subsystems will include application-specific blocks and software. IP integration services will become increasingly important to validate the IP in the system context
• Multi-core designs will drive increasingly complex architectures. As the number of CPUs increase, so will the demand peripherals and software. Higher level views of the IP, such as transaction-level models of the IP, will be key to understanding and modeling the SoC architecture. A virtual prototype of the IP and the larger SoC will enable earlier and more efficient development of application software and middleware.

This is an exciting time for the semiconductor IP business as companies strive to develop the best solutions that help designers accelerate their time from concept to implementation. These solutions enable value throughout the design chain by accelerating HW/SW integration & systems validation, allowing efficient SoC architecture exploration and optimization, creating and optimizing functional blocks and using high-quality semiconductor IP.