johnteaton Posted October 19, 2015 Report Share Posted October 19, 2015 Hello all,I have been using ip-xact since the 2009 to drive my digital tool flows and I am disapointed at the slow rate of adoption that I see in this industry. It is time to admit that our marketing plan of "if we build it then they will come" has not been working and come up with a real plan.Our target customer is not the tool smith,ip creator or silicon vendor. Those groups are already on board. Our target has to be the soc designers who create the designs and bring them to production. How do we convince them to change their tried and true methods for something new?First of all we show them that it can be done. Find some teams that have already adopted ip-xact and publish articles about how they did it with all the plus and minuses.Release a reference design environment with open sourced ip ,tools and toolflows that uses ip-xact to build an embedded system on a fpga demo boardWrite a handbook. Jtag is a very popular standard but nobody designs it to the 1149.1 spec. Everyone buys a copy of Ken Parkers "Boundary Scan Handbook" and designs to that. The standard tells you WHAT. The handbook tells you WHAT,WHY and HOW. With lots of working examples. Simplify the standard. Jtag consists of a family of standards from 1149.1 up to 1149.7. The dot 1 standard is very simple and only defines the pieces that all the other standards require. A lot of engineers can do everything they need using only 1149.1. We need to split off the fundamentals into a 1685.1 and add a new dot for each major feature.Write an elevator speech. You meet a target customer at some conference and you only have a few minutes to convince them to look further into ip-xact. How do you introduce ip-xact without sounding like your trying to sign them up of some multilevel marketing scheme. What will catch their interest.Learn from our elders. Back in the 90's the PCB world came up with a universal data interchange format called EDIF. It was supposed to take any design created in any schematic capture system and transfer it to any other. It never really met its goals. All the vendors adopted it but did so with their own unique "flavor" of the standard. You never really could get everything to transfer between all the different vendors. Explain how ip-xact is not going to suffer the same fate with vendorExtensions.Scare the crap out of them. They have been designing chips succesfully for 20 years using the same techniques so why should they change now? Because those chips have been growing and we are now to the point where an IC design environment is starting to behave like "Big Data". The rules don't change with "Big Data" but they are enforced more often. You can make a lot of mistakes in a small data environment and still muddle through and get a chip. Try that with "Big Data" and you will fail and your failure will be spectacular. "Big Data" will show us which teams have real engineers and which ones have hackers. Our industry has thousands of IP creators designing for thousands of IP users and ip-xact is the only standard we have to govern that exchange. If you do not use it then you will not survive "Big Data".Comments , Thoughts? John Eaton z3qmtr45@gmail.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marknoll Posted October 20, 2015 Report Share Posted October 20, 2015 Hard to argue with the premise of this. A good discussion topic for the next TC meeting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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