February 3, 2005 -- Lawyers have labeled reusable design blocks, or cores, as IP (intellectual property), despite the fact that most electronics designers use IP to mean Internet Protocol, and most engineers prefer to describe such products as "virtual cores." Nonetheless, the use of "IP" as "intellectual property" has become prevalent, marking just one example of the confusion surrounding this segment of the electronics industry. Although many analysts and marketing professionals point to the IP market as a new phenomenon in the industry, the technology and a market for third-party, reusable IP has been around for almost 20 years. Although the IP market is growing, it suffers from a lack of business and engineering standards. The lack of standard licensing practices and quality metrics too often offsets the advantage of obtaining verified, production-ready, implementations of standard logic functions is. Yet, given the shorter development time that today's electronics market requires, the use of reliable IP saves time, decreases the size of the development team, and may increase the market life of the product.

By Gabe Moretti, EDN Technical Editor