FPGA Programming and how does IP Core licensing work?

Question

Hello,

I have been looking into developing a hardware module for HD video capture. I an new to the whole thing so I looked around and found that I need an FPGA development board to test my design out and then may be deploy it through ASIC or FPGA itself.

I found that people have already written cores in Verilog/VHDL which I can directly use in my designs, e.g. a PCIe interface module, a DDR3 memory controller module etc. I just need to connect them a logical way and test out my designs.

I was wondering how does the licensing of these IP Cores work. On certain vendor sites I see terms like "SignOnce" etc. Once I have a design that works and I want to mass produce it, how do I license the core?

I know it may depend on the specific vendor I am buying cores from but I just want to get a general idea, like a few examples etc, or if something similar you may have done in the past.

Thanks!

Answer 1

From what I recall (and of course depending on the licensing agreement you negotiate), you have multiple models available:

1. license per "product" (i.e. royalty on each "product instance" but limited to a specific "product")
2. license per "product instance" regardless of "product type"
3. one-time, all-you-can-eat, license etc.

Answer 2

There are all kinds of possible licenses. You will have to discuss the details with whatever vendor you are buying from since many will work with you and write up a custom contract that meets whatever needs you might have.

On the other hand, why pay to license IP cores? There are many quality FPGA cores available at opencores.org that can be used royalty-free.

Answer 3

As others have said there are many models for licensing.

The opencores cores are of very variable quality, so you might find a lot of work involved in getting it going. On the other hand, some of them do work out of the box. BTW, how the GPL (which is how some of them are licensed) affects the disclosure of the rest of your FPGA code is still under debate :)

In terms of commercial licensing, my experience is that many companies are still to be operating under an ASIC frame of mind, where they charge a huge amount up front. There are some who will also license per-project, or take part of the payment as royalty.

And then you need to consider whether you just want a "netlist" or the actual source for the core. Figure on 10x in price if you want the source.

SignOnce is a license which means you only have to get your lawyers to check it out once and then you can proceed with various vendors knowing that the legalese is the same with all of them. It says nothing about commercial terms as far as I recall.

Once you get to having multiple cores, making them all interact can be interesting as well. That's one of the benefits of the IP offerings that are integrated with Xilinx and Altera's SOC development products. They are all built around a common bus (which admittedly differs between X and A, but at least within their own tool its common). This means they can be joined up in a point-and-click way. If you have wildly different bus structures on your IP, you find yourself writing a lot of glue code :(

Answer 4

While there are many license, most are full usage or per product type. Few charge per instance built. Those from Altera and Xilinx are full usage or per product type. However for putting it in an ASIC/HardCopy/FastPath, they usually have an additional fee.