FSA, Chip Estimate bring greater value to semicon design community

SAN JOSE, USA: The Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA), the global voice of the fabless business model, has collaborated with Chip Estimate Corp. to bring greater value to the semiconductor design community with FSA’s IPecosystem tool suite.

With this agreement, vendors now have an option to upload their Hard Intellectual Property (IP) Quality Risk Assessment Tool “risk profiles” to Chip Estimate’s chip planning portal. In addition, Chip Estimate users have the option to request a vendor’s risk profiles or request that a vendor complete the Tool for their IP or family of IP within their portfolio. These features have been released as part of FSA’s Hard IP Quality Risk Assessment Tool version 3.0.

"FSA selected Chip Estimate because its chip planning portal is comprehensive with over 6,000 IP components, it has a powerful IP search tool, and it offers free chip prediction technology to enable designers to fully explore IP in a chip context," said Lisa Tafoya, vice president of global research at FSA. "Because Chip Estimate is providing worldwide access to FSA's Hard IP Quality Risk Assessment profiles on its site, the design community will have an additional tool that will enhance and increase the quality of overall chip designs based on industry-developed IP quality profiles."

"Strengthening our alliance with FSA and leading IP suppliers by making FSA's IP Quality Risk Assessment Tool profiles available to our design community delivers even greater capabilities for predicting overall design quality of end products," said Adam Traidman, president of Chip Estimate.

The Hard IP Quality Risk Assessment Tool, the first deliverable in FSA’s IPecosystem Tool Suite, collects information about an IP vendor, its design methodology and the IP under evaluation to enable risk assessment across seven criteria: IP design, integration, verification, process technology, product documentation, reliability and test.

"As more SoC designers adopt a third-party IP integration strategy, they must be able to assess and quantify any risk that may be associated with this ‘buy versus make’ decision," said Larry Morrell, vice president and general manager of IP Products at Impinj. "FSA’s quality risk assessment tool provides that assurance, as well as a way to identify the high-quality IP suppliers."