Measurement of IP qualification costs and benefits

IP core reuse is necessary to overcome the design gap. Yet experience during IP integration has shown that risk is still considerably high when dealing with IPs. IP qualification provides IP providers and integrators with measurable quality characteristics that allow for high quality IP cores and to put buy decisions on a quantifiable basis. This paper presents unprecedented results that facilitate the comparison of the effectiveness of reusing qualified, digital soft IP to previous, immature reuse methods. An impressive reduction in IP integration effort, which is profitable for the IP customer, is demonstrated. Moreover, we show that the IP business can be profitable for the IP provider despite the additional qualification effort.