FROM EDN EUROPE: a few more bricks in the IP wall

By Graham Prophet -- EDN, 9/1/2000

A few months ago, I attended a conference panel session on IP (intellectual-property) protection—IP in the sense of tradable function blocks for incorporation into system-on-silicon ICs. To say that there was no meeting of the minds on the protection issue would be an understatement. One viewpoint (generally, from the larger semiconductor companies) was that there simply was no problem; no reputable company is going to waste its time and reputation trying to steal your IP when it could just buy it and get on with the important business of cutting time to market. In this view, regular contractual arrangements that govern any other business transaction will be adequate for this new area of commerce.

To which the specialist IP companies—especially the smaller ones—responded by pointing out that their entire capital, intellectual or otherwise, is bound up in those circuit functions, and they see protection mechanisms as absolute necessities.

It's hard to get a grip on the amount of IP trading that is taking place; there are numbers, but the confidence figure is low. What does seem to be clear is that the bigger picture of the proposed new design model—disaggregated OEM companies that buy IP on the open market, as they need it, to build system-on-silicon ICs for innovative new products—is taking a lot longer to take off than many had hoped. There are many reasons why this situation should be; you can cite the scarcity of genuinely high-quality, freely tradable IP blocks or the difficulty—even if you succeed in buying them—of making them work in a plug-and-play manner. Or, as many seem to believe, you can speculate that the number of projects and designers around the world that are truly ready to engage in system-on-chip design just isn't very large yet.

We are often inclined to view some of these issues in isolation, but in reality they have a parallel in the wider world. As Internet-based commerce becomes more prevalent, it is bound to force a convergence of laws and practices surrounding copyright and IP ownership—just look at the furore around the distribution of MP3-format music over the Internet. Indeed, some question whether the notion of copyright can have any real meaning in the Internet age.

Determined efforts exist to take these issues out of the critical path of growth in IP-based chip design. At the Virtual Component Exchange (VCX, www.vcx.org), details of available IP are now going live on the Web site. VCX aims to facilitate the trading of IP between member organisations on both provider and consumer sides of the business. You can use its site to search for IP blocks that suit your purposes; you can make formal contact with the provider organisation through the VCX server, and you can work through a number of levels of disclosure (from the provider's perspective) and verification (from the user's viewpoint). At one level, you might be evaluating block functions in simulation over the Internet; at the next, you might engage in a "try-before-buy" arrangement that would give you more access to the detail of the IP. In all of this, and leading up to a formal purchase agreement, saving time by buying-in IP is of little point if you then lose the time in complex negotiations and legal issues. VCX aims to completely automate this process, working to standardise contractual arrangements, with its software automatically outputting all of the legal documentation surrounding the deal.

Meanwhile, the Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) working group of the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA) has published a white paper that provides a condensed briefing on the various protection mechanisms that have been developed (and are being developed) to allow both primary protection of IP (for example, encryption) and traceability of IP that is used—legitimately or otherwise—in chips built in foundries around the world. Examples of the latter include so-called watermarking, digital signatures, and noise fingerprinting. You can download the paper from www.vsi.org. It covers deterrents, protection mechanisms, detection schemes, and silicon-security options. Working group chair Ian Mackintosh, discussing the infringement problems that the industry has right now, points out that most improper use of IP is by people who already have access to it and that there is a general awareness among VSIA members of the need to do something to IP to embody a record within it of its ownership and invention. So, Mackintosh encourages feedback from readers of the IPP white paper. Do any of the mechanisms the paper describes meet what you see as the key requirements of IP protection? Would you like to see other mechanisms? Do you see this whole subject as an impediment to more widespread use of IP-based design? The VSIA working group would like to know, so e-mail Mackintosh at i.mackintosh@att.net. And we at EDN would like to know, too.