Mine, all mine!

Intellectual property (IP) comes in many shapes and forms – patented inventions, copyrighted material, trademarks to reinforce brand identity, proprietary designs that determine product appearance, trade secrets or company specific ‘know how’. The term can refer specifically to internally developed design blocks or cores licensed from an IP vendor to form part of a system on chip (SoC) design. Under the umbrella of intellectual assets, IP might represent one part of a combination of tools and prior knowledge necessary to engineer a new product. Shorter time to market requirements and the huge number of transistors available nowadays ensure that no matter what the design environment – system or SoC – a level of design reuse is bound to be taking place. Any successful reuse based model relies upon cooperation and trust between engineers, as knowledge of intimate design details such as the RTL HDL source code has to be shared. Meanwhile, with design, test and manufacturing environments now seldom centralised, IP needs to be shared across borders, making it difficult for those charged with protecting it to monitor where it is and who has access to it. Whatever the form of IP at your disposal, the ability to quantify, qualify and protect it makes good sense. Just as an externally sourced design has a price tag, so internally developed IP needs a value and the appropriate security.