Introduction to IP Lifecycle Management

This is a guest post by Methodics that delivers state-of-the-art semiconductor data management (DM)  for analog, digital and SoC  design  teams.

No doubt that by now you have noticed that IP Lifecycle Management is a key Focus for Methodics and is a cornerstone of our platform for IP creators and SoC Integrators. Also by now you have started to ask yourself what is IP Lifecycle Management and why is it important.

To help we have a detailed whitepaper available here (link). [need to be logged in to download links]

In this blog post I will just give a high level overview as well as explore why it is becoming more important than ever.

IP Lifecycle Management (shown on the right) is a process that follows IP from acquisition/creation all the way until it is finally integrated into the design – along the way providing key insights into the status of the design. At each step in the process specific challenges need to be addressed and tools provided. Specifically;

1. Acquire: Closely manage the design data for each version of the design.
2. Qualify: Verify IP to ensure it meets defined quality goals, and control usage and visibility of the IP based on the quality level.
3. Distribute: Provide infrastructure to allow designers to discover available IP and make the design data available to them regardless of location.
4. Integrate: Enable designers to quickly build correct by construction workspaces that contain the required IP.

This lifecycle is built on a core of Design Data Management that has been optimized for IP and understands the unique characteristics of semiconductor IP (compared to standard software development) with analytics to enable informed decisions throughout.

So that is the what taken care of, what about the why?

Its said a picture paints a thousand words and I think the graph on the right says more about why IP management is increasing in importance than I could. Its clear from this picture that we are already past the point of trying to manage IP with ad-hoc methods.

There is no so many diverse IP blocks in a design that without management tools its easy to waste large amounts of development effort, or worse yet – allow bad IP to make it into a design.

We hope you will take the time to look over the whitepaper to learn more, and please leave any questions in the comments below.