What's the difference between a hot product and dud? Let me tell you: it's the degree to which a product completely solves a problem. Hot products do something, and they do it well and most importantly they do it completely.

Let me give two examples of complete products. First, the ubiquitous Starbucks. High quality coffee, available everywhere, in almost every variant you'd want, and delivered to people completely consistently no matter where you are. I get the same café latte in Cambridge as I do in Paris, New York, and San Francisco. You can count on it. That's a complete product.

Then there is the ubiquitous Apple iPod. Apple was a late comer to the MP3 player market, but it came with a complete product that the market soon identified as superior to all others. Not only did it provide the MP3 player, but it provided content. And it put it together in a way that the users felt was natural and complete. Combined with a little marketing sizzle, the iPod became the must have fashion accessory that had a practical purpose of allowing people to carry their entire music collection along with them to listen to in any environment they chose.

Now Apple is turning the cell phone world upside down with its iPhone, again taking advantage of the "holes" in traditional supplier's offerings. Most of these suppliers were oblivious that these holes even existed. Consumers knew it all along, but perhaps could not articulate it.

Closer to home, let me give two other examples of complete products that changed our industry: Synopsys' Design Compiler logic synthesis tool and Cadence's Verilog-XL simulator.

These products were released nearly 20 years ago and reshaped the semiconductor industry. These weren't "point" tools that partially solved a problem. They did what they did very completely. Engineers could completely describe their design in Verilog and with these tools translate that design to optimized gates and verify the design all the way to GDSII.

As a result, a youthful Cadence and Synopsys zoomed ahead of the entrenched leaders in EDA (Daisy and Mentor Graphics) as engineers changed the way they designed chips because of the availability of complete solutions that had great value.

It's ironic that the biggest offenders of incomplete products today come from EDA and IP companies.

EDA companies today are focused today on nibbling around the edges of the existing chip design tool infrastructure and struggle to find that "next big thing" that is on par with Design Compiler and Verilog-XL.

They seem to be turning out incremental improvements rather than dramatic new ideas to provide new efficiencies for the modern designer. As such we get a mishmash of niche products that get us 80% there, that are incompatible with each other and offer too little value in the grand scheme of things.

Unlike 20 years ago when there were only a few tools that worked well together, today's chip designer is faced with assembling Frankenstein's monster from the best tools from a variety of suppliers.

IP companies can also be found among those guilty of providing Swiss cheese solutions to its customers. Often times this is a result of the IP provider not understanding (and anticipating) the multiple contexts in which their IP might be used and not considering deeply the ramification of the architecture of that IP.

Another glaring weakness that seems to afflict IP providers is to not appreciate the system level and EDA integration work that chip designers need to do in order to use the IP. The result is often an IP that only partially satisfies the needs of the customer. Filling in the missing bits is an exercise left to the user.

All of this is not without hope. As the semiconductor, EDA, and IP industries mature, the missing pieces begin to be filled in. In next month's column we will discuss some of these prescriptions for changing (Swiss) cheesy solutions into a nice Wensleydale.

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.