The IP industry has to be more professional in order to grow, according to one of the leading suppliers.

"The $1bn IP market should be ten times bigger," said Charlie Janac, CEO of French network on chip IP supplier Arteris, speaking at the SAME 2007 conference in Sophia Antipolis, France.

"There's a lot of work to do to achieve its potential and the IP industry has to be a hell of a lot more professional than it has been and make its customers happy," said Janac.

The company currently has five customers with the first 65nm implementation of its technology being launched next month. "It's not inconceivable that IP should be 10 per cent of the $250bn semiconductor market but IP hasn't been clever - there isn't an accepted model for doing business so that there's a happy exchange of value."

"The mechanisms for integrating IP also hasn't been worked out - sometimes it works for one or two use cases but is not broad enough," he said.

"There are many professional IP suppliers, look at ARM or ARC, but it's like any business with competition," said Bert Zandhuis, vice-president of sales at multicore IP supplier Coresonic which two weeks ago appointed former ARC founder Rick Clucas as CEO and includes Arteris founder Alian Fanet on its board. Coresonic is developing hardware and software for baseband modems in mobile phones.

See also: The Electronics Weekly blog Core Values in which Warren Savage covers the IP market