Would you pay more for quality IP? That was the big question brought up during a DesignCon 2007 panel Wednesday called "The Business Impact of IP Quality on Market Growth: Freeing the Genie." The big answer, according to panelists representing the IP and EDA industries, is "No," users will not pay more for IP quality.
That sentiment contradicts user views I gathered for my cover story in the new issue of EDN (see "Evaluating IP with the four Cs: compare, consider, collect, and calculate"). In that article, I found that quality is actually the foremost concern of designers regarding IP.
In a nutshell, the big problem is that many designers spend way too much time, and thus their companies spend too much money, re-verifying IP from vendors. And most of that effort goes not toward merely verifying that a core works in the context of the target SOC (system on chip). Nor do designers spend that time checking that the core complies with a given standard (such as PCI or USB). Instead, they spend that time finding functional errors—bugs—in a given vendor's IP. It is much like buying a car and having to go home to rework the engine.
A few users indicated that they would pay more if they knew the IP was of high quality. But how can you know if a core is high quality until you use it?Source