Impact of Intellectual Property Cores on Field Programmable Gate Array Designs
Lesley Shannon · Library and Archives Canada (Government of Canada) · 2001
Intellectual Property (IP) design is a rapidly growing industry and designers and users are being challenged to develop infrastructure and standard interfaces for this new indus-try. This research studies the impact that Intellectual Property cores have on the design of Systems-on-Chip (SoC) implemented on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). To obtain an understanding of the current state of core technology, a system was built us-ing multiple IP cores. A core was designed to learn about core design issues while the remaining cores were obtained from vendors. The results were slightly discouraging as it is not a simple process to incorporate third party cores into a design, nor was it easy to obtain cores for the system. Still, the experi-ence has provided much insight as to what problems must be addressed in the IP industry to facilitate a design methodology that includes the use of IP. These challenges include basic concerns such as interfacing difficulties as well as documentation problems that have been grossly underestimated. Yet the issue remains: circuits are becoming too complex to cus-tom design and achieve the desired time-to-market of a product; so how can we interface