Can IP quality be objectively measured?

Virtual components (VC), also known as intellectual property (IP), have long been a part of the engineering reality. Business drivers, such as improved time to market and better resource utilization are factoring ever more into the make versus buy decision process. Maximizing in-house design resources and purchasing commodity or standard IP has become the de facto business model. Unfortunately, with the increasing number of IP vendors competing in the marketplace, the decision making process is not clear. Simplistically, functionality needs to be the first criteria, but when two or more similar IPs are available, the selection criterion quickly becomes more difficult. This paper addresses the process of measuring IP quality, presents a summary of the VSIA quality IP (QIP) metric, and reports the on-going work.