What SOC Size Growth Means for IP Management

What SOC Size Growth Means for IP Management
by Tom Simon on 03-22-2016 at 12:00 pm

Whether or not in the past you believed all the of rhetoric about exploding design complexity in SOC’s, today there can be no debate that SOC size and complexity is well beyond something that can be managed without some kind of design management system. As would be expected, development of most larger designs relies on a data management… Read More


The (not so) Easy Life of an SOC Design Integrator

The (not so) Easy Life of an SOC Design Integrator
by Tom Simon on 02-16-2016 at 3:00 pm

How can large SOC projects effectively integrate sub blocks and IP into a stable version for release or internal development? The person responsible for integrating SOC sub blocks into a validated configuration for release has a difficult task. Usually there are many sub-blocks, each undergoing their own development. There… Read More


How to Overcome HW Project Release Nightmares

How to Overcome HW Project Release Nightmares
by Tom Simon on 12-21-2015 at 8:00 pm

Is a software development release methodology a “square peg in a round hole” when it comes to hardware design? To answer this question we have to look at how exactly hardware design projects differ from their software counterparts. Intuitively we know they are fundamentally different. Let’s take a second to dig deeper to understand… Read More


How to Live with Rapid Changes During Early Development of IP

How to Live with Rapid Changes During Early Development of IP
by Tom Simon on 10-30-2015 at 4:00 pm

Best practices call for using a version control system with systematic releases when developing IP. However, in the early stages of IP development using a rigid version control system with a cumbersome release process can hinder productivity. To fully understand how this works we should start by defining what is meant when we … Read More


Why Your IP Release Methodology Can Make or Break Reuse Success

Why Your IP Release Methodology Can Make or Break Reuse Success
by Tom Simon on 10-24-2015 at 7:00 am

When the term IP first came into popular usage for IC design, it was primarily conceived as blocks of design content that were bought occasionally from external sources. A customer might use one or two in a design, and expect one delivery with perhaps some minor updates before tapeout. Over the last 18 years, this notion has changed… Read More