Semiconductor intellectual property is a unit of cell, logic, and chip layout design that can be reused by the creator party. Intellectual property in a semiconductor is usually developed with the purpose of licensing to multiple vendors for utilization as a building block in several chip designs.
In today’s generation of integrated circuit (IC) designs, more and more system functionality is getting integrated into single chips (System on Chip (SoC) designs). In these SoC designs, pre-designed IP cores/blocks are becoming increasingly important. This is because most SoC designs have a standard microprocessor and a lot of system functionality that is standardized, and therefore can be reutilized across various designs.