What is IP anyway?

Let me be the first one to put my hand up and say it: it took me a while to wrap my head around IP. I am a relative newcomer to this industry, having studied business in university instead of engineering, and trying to stay afloat amidst the constant rush of TLAs (Three Letter Abbreviations) and other engineering parlance. It seems like every day another abbreviation comes up and off I disappear down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia trying to nail down a definition of what I’m supposed to be understanding. An early example of these is that old chestnut, IP, which has inspired me to write this blog.

               It turns out IP is one of those things that you need to understand when working at ARM, as I discovered early on when people were talking about “connecting IP blocks together”. Being a diligent employee and wanting to learn, I went to find out what this IP could be. A quick search on www.acronymfinder.com revealed over 100 terms that could stand for IP, including ‘Inhalable Pump’ and ‘Irish Pennant’. I highly doubted that ARM was in the business of connecting Inhalable Pumps together, so I began to search elsewhere.

An exhaustive initial search (read: Googling “what is ip?”) showed slightly discouraging results: my IP address. Or to be more precise, 216.140.95.20. But this doesn’t make any sense? Surely ARM isn’t in the business of connecting up blocks of numbers?! Not wanting to be felled by the first hurdle I persevered, and a look at the 2^nd Google search result revealed that this IP that I was looking at was actually an Internet Protocol address. This sounded vaguely familiar, as I could remember back to my teenage years when I was denied access to the video streaming website Hulu due to my IP address coming from the wrong territory! I was fascinated to discover that every device in a network that uses the Internet to communicate (be that a computer, printer, TV or thermostat) has a numerical label designed both to identify it and display its address on the network. I was also interested to discover that the original creators of these IP addresses had not surprisingly underestimated the way the internet would expand, and that they were running out of them. That was until someone had the clever idea of adding an extra couple of numbers on the end to solve that problem forever (until the IoT becomes far more popular than we imagine). While all of this information was highly interesting it still did not seem relevant to the IP that was being mentioned in the office, because to the best of my knowledge you can’t connect Internet Protocol addresses together. Thus it seemed that an IP address would leave me disappointed, just like it did in the past with Hulu. The search continued into uncharted territory, the 4^th Google search result.

               I definitely seemed to be on the right track this time as I started reading about Intellectual Property being ‘creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce’. This made a lot more sense and would explain why there are so many framed patents on the walls in ARM. Going back to the original question of “connecting IP”, an image sprung into my mind of a man sticking some patents together with a stick of glue. It did explain why people are so secretive about the distribution of information, as the implications of intellectual property being distributed to the wrong people could be enormous. All was going well until I suffered another setback when the term “intangible assets” popped up. Now I’m clearly no expert on this subject but in any man’s dictionary intangible assets do not exist physically, and therefore can’t be connected together. Therefore the search had to continue, but I felt that I was getting somewhere at least.

               In the pursuit of journalistic integrity and solid answers, I had to expand my search outside of the realm of reasonable expectations. This required steely grit, determination and (*gulp*) going past the first page of Google search results. This truly represented sailing into uncharted waters and by the time I found what I was looking for (page 7), I had seen things that some had thought to be lost forever.

(Source)

Here I found a link to the Xilinx webpage, saying: “Intellectual Property (IP) are key building blocks of Xilinx Targeted Design Platforms”. At last, I was onto something! A quick browse through the website and beyond led me to the definition of an IP block as “a reusable unit of logic, cell, or chip layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores may be licensed to another party or can be owned and used by a single party alone. The term is derived from the licensing of the patent that exists in the design”. So it seems that each individual IP block is physically manufactured based on the intellectual property designs protected by patents. These blocks perform specific functions, such as CPU, interconnect, memory controller and so on, and must be stitched together in order to be worth more than the sum of their parts and work effectively as part of a larger SoC. As I read more and more about the different IP blocks that are out there and their specifications, the more technical and complex the descriptions became, until I eventually decided enough was enough. In my head, IP blocks are like Lego blocks. One on its own is pretty useless, however when combined together by a good designer they can be transformed into something much more functional. Simple, really.

How I imagine ARM's library of IP (Source)