Semiconductor intellectual property core

In electronic design a semiconductor intellectual property core, IP core, or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or integrated circuit (comonly called a "chip") layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores may be licensed to another party or can be owned and used by a single party alone. The term is derived from the licensing of the patent and/or source code copyright that exist in the design. IP cores can be used as building blocks within application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs or field-programmable gate array (FPGA) logic designs.

The licensing and use of IP cores in chip design came into common practice in the 1990s. There were many licensors and also many foundries competing on the market. Today, the most widely licensed IP cores are from ARM Holdings (43.2% market share in 2013), Synopsys Inc. (13.9% market share in 2013), Imagination Technologies (9% market share in 2013) and Cadence Design Systems (5.1% market share in 2013).

The IP core can be described as being for chip design what a library is for computer programming or a discrete integrated circuit component is for printed circuit board design.

IP cores are typically offered as synthesizable RTL. Synthesizable cores are delivered in a hardware description language such as Verilog or VHSIC hardware description language (VHDL). These are analogous to high level languages such as C in the field of computer programming. IP cores delivered to chip makers as RTL permit chip designers to modify designs (at the functional level), though many IP vendors offer no warranty or support for modified designs.

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