Developing e-commerce business models for enabling silicon intellectual property transactions

Abstract

Integrated Circuit (IC) design productivity has failed to keep pace with Moore's Law in the past decade; thus, a 'design productivity gap' between the increase in IC design complexity and increased productivity has emerged. As the IC industry migrates to the System-On-Chip (SOC) era, the nature of Silicon Intellectual Property (SIP), which can narrow the 'design productivity gap', has made SIP critical for the design and implementation of a complex SOC. There are two major categories of SIP problems, technical and business; both are based on current SIP transaction business processes. The primary purpose of this paper is to develop e-commerce business models to resolve complex technical and business issues in SIP transactions and thus enable the business more fully online. The benefits of the proposed e-commerce business models and efficiency improvements to SOC designs regarding the leveraging of the proposed models are discussed.