For engineers who might wonder what happened to that great product they designed years ago, there is now a process by which it can be resurrected and given a new lease of life.
IPextreme goes through the legacy IP of companies, figures out what is re-usable today, re-engineers it to make it suitable for the needs of the market today, then licenses it on to customers who get technology which often took many person-years to develop for a reasonable cost.
An example of what IPextreme does is the licensing of the 27 year-old
Coldfire technology of Freescale, and the CR16 16-bit microcontroller technology of National Semiconductor.
“People who wanted to use this technology suddenly found they could get it through us,” said Warren Savage, CEO of IPextreme.
He gives the example of a high performance 8051 design he worked on at Synopsys, a previous employer, where they wanted to make a clone of a part from Dallas Semiconductor.
“We had to put in the bugs to make it truly compatible,” said Savage. “It was a bug-compatible 8051 which went into a European Space Agency rocket. Years later Dallas asked us to license it to them. They told us: ‘The engineers who designed it have all quit, and we can’t find the design’.”
Savage reckons some of the old stuff can do a job just as well as modern designs. “People do all this development and in ten years it is in a box somewhere or on a rubbish heap. We can give it a second life,” said Savage.