Those of us working in semiconductor IP industry are well aware of the Not-Invented-Here (NIH) Syndrome. Simply put, it's a pathology associated with an engineering reluctance to use other people's work.

In the semiconductor industry NIH has had a very natural and strong history in that until about 20 years ago, the industry was fully vertically integrated. Fabrication, EDA tools, and all design were totally captive with the four walls of the semiconductor company.

Bit by bit semiconductor companies have disaggregated. First came the rise of independent foundries. Next, internal CAD departments were largely replaced by a nascent EDA industry. The latest assault on the vertical integration came squarely at the chip design engineer in the form of IP companies offering to sell their designs for a fraction of the internal development cost.

Chip designers were right to be skeptical in the early days. Using IP represents a critical external dependency. One bug can be very costly, forcing respins of devices and jeopardizing critical time-to-market advantages. In the late 1990's, hundreds of IP companies sprung up and many semiconductor companies were burned by poor quality IP they had bought. The tech downturn in the early part of this decade brought the longest and deepest of any recession in semiconductor history but had two very positive effects on the industry which have had lasting effect:

1. The evaporation of design starts drove more than half of the IP companies out of business as there was simply no market for their products.
2. The economic crunch faced by semiconductor companies forced companies to adopt IP reuse (e.g. buying IP) as an efficient way to design chips.

NIH dead? Yes, but...

Forced by economic realities to use IP and by those same forces to drive from the market bad IP companies, these engineers are seeing the benefit of making their own designs packaged for internal IP reuse. As a result, we are seeing almost every large semiconductor company adopting formalized processes to "capture" their IP assets in a way that allows for internal reuse (and in some cases, commerce) within their company.

This represents another true inflection point in the semiconductor industry and ushers us into what someday will be seen as a golden age of IP reuse. In the flat world in which we compete, optimising the balance between internal and external IP use will be a key differentiator. And probably even more importantly for those of us that live in the high-cost western areas of the world, internal reuse represents a powerful counterbalance to the forces that drive us to outsource development to low-cost regions. Reuse trumps new design every time, no matter how low the cost.

Within the next 10 years, we will see companies capturing 99% of new designs in the form of reusable IP and leveraging the experience and knowledge of their employees to the likes we have never seen. So, by all means, let's invent. Let's just do it in a way that somebody else can benefit from it.
 

Warren Savage, President and CEO of IPextreme, is a well-known and published authority in the field of semiconductor intellectual property. He has a long history of pushing the envelope of design methodology from his work in fault tolerant computing at Tandem Computers in the 1980's and driving reliable design methodologies into commercial practice at Synopsys for its DesignWare IP product in the 1990s.

Much of his thinking became embodied in the seminal book on IP reuse, the Reuse Methodology Manual. Warren is taking his vision to the next level with his latest company, IPextreme, which is focused on enabling broad commercialisation of IP captive in large semiconductor companies.