Be a star in the crowd
18 May 2009
A business model innovation for the semiconductor IP industry was released by IPextreme. The Constellations program provides the business level infrastructure for enabling an open community of independent semiconductor IP companies to collaborate at the sales level by sharing sales intelligence and market wisdom to provide a virtual world-wide sales footprint.
Constellations is aimed at solving a problem that has long troubled the semiconductor IP community—small companies with good technology lack the global sales footprint to compete against larger competitors and are therefore at a structural disadvantage that results in an oligarchic industry structure that rewards the large players at the expense of the small ones.
Members of the program can submit known opportunities for IP they don’t carry to the Constellations database where they are routed to the sales team of the relevant member companies. When a member company registers a sale, a royalty is paid back into the program and shared with the submitting member company.
Initial members of Constellations include:
CAST, Inc., New Jersey, USA
“We have a broad range of solid IP products - and proven expertise in everything from processors to interfaces to multimedia and encryption - but sometimes our customers need additional IP or services,” said Hal Barbour, president of CAST, Inc. “We're excited to offer customers even more complete solutions through the innovative Constellations program.”
NXP Semiconductor, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
“The Constellations program will create unique opportunities in the semiconductor industry and we are pleased to be a part of this initiative”, said Bart De Loore, Vice President and Corporate IP & Architecture Manager, NXP Semiconductors. “NXP has valuable IP, such as the CoolFlux DSP & BSP cores, that we can now offer to the industry as part of this program.”
Sidense, Ontario, Canada
“Over the past year, we have seen a significant increase of interest in our low-cost, field-programmable, secure and reliable embedded one-time programmable IP for a wide variety of on-chip data and code storage, key encryption, and analog trimming/sensor calibration applications,” stated Xerxes Wania, Sidense President and CEO. “IPextreme’s Constellations Program gives us a great opportunity to reach a large number of embedded memory users and to engage these potential customers at a very reasonable cost.”
Tiempo, Grenoble, France
“Tiempo asynchronous and delay-insensitive design technology represents the next breakthrough for ultra-low power, green semiconductor devices,” said Serge Maginot, CEO of Tiempo S.A.S, “Constellations is an innovative way to provide global visibility for our microcontroller and crypto-processor IP products that are designed in this disruptive technology.”
Jeff Howe, writing in Wired magazine, defined crowdsourcing as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”
“IPextreme was founded around the principle of expanding the IP market by enabling semiconductor companies to monetise their high value IP assets,” said Warren Savage, president and CEO of IPextreme. “We see Constellations’ crowdsourcing approach as an additional way that we can bring value to the semiconductor market by enabling independent IP companies to have the value of their products made visible to more customers at minimum expense.”
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