"The reasons to use IP are to collapse the schedule and leverage expertise from outside the organization," said Mark Miller, vice president of marketing and business development for Synchronicity Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.). "Yet from the point a potential consumer becomes aware of a piece of IP until a deal is closed can take five months."

Miller said he intends to help resolve that thorny problem in his new role as chairman of Rapid, the Reusable Application-Specific Intellectual Property Developers. The three-year-old organization, based here, attempts to get more intellectual property into the hands of design engineers by tackling a range of business issues, licensing among them. It intends to complement the work of the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA), which focuses on technical issues that may hold back the intellectual property industry, he said.

Shortening the time it takes to work out a licensing deal is a priority, Miller said. "This is not an efficient process. We'd like to do everything we can to make the process simpler and cheaper for both the consumer and the developer." He added, "This is a very small, young industry, and there aren't a lot of resources available other than to design the best IP. Not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers sure sounds like a win."

The problem stems from the fact that licensing a non-physical asset like intellectual property is different than acquiring and using hardware. "People are trying to apply a set of business rules based in the physical world to products that don't exist in the physical world," said Richard Terrill, marketing director at Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), who until recently was part of Rapid's board. Since the intellectual property business is relatively new, many customers and developers waste a lot of time hashing out issues surrounding royalties, reuse and indemnification, Terrill said.

Speeding processes

Rapid has been trying to find ways, including creating templates from which both parties could work, to enlighten IP suppliers and consumers about these issues before deals are negotiated. "The transaction zips along if the consumer is educated," Terrill said. For that reason, one of Rapid's four working groups is responsible for identifying legal issues and working with vendors and customers on ways to speed the process.

With close to 50 members, Rapid has three other working groups: VC catalog, which places technical and business data on virtual components into a catalog; business modeling, aimed at identifying, researching and defining business models for intellectual property; and market research.

Members include: EDA vendors Aristo Components, Cadence Design Systems, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys Inc.; semiconductor vendors Conexant Systems Inc., Motorola Inc. and UMC Group; and IP vendors such as Artisan Components, MoSys Inc. and Wiznet.

Rapid earlier this year reached agreement with the Virtual Component Exchange (VCX) to form joint task forces to help meet business and legal challenges. Those groups will look at creating effective business models for IP companies as well as creating an Internet-based IP identification and qualification system. It will also create workable licensing models. Miller called VCX (Livingston, Scotland) "the equivalent of the Chicago Commodity Exchange."

Creating closer ties among Rapid, VSIA and VCX will be a priority of the new board, Miller said. Other board members include: Rich Goldman of Synopsys; Nick English of Conexant; Dave Reed of Cadence; John Homin of Chip Express Corp.; Robert Keller of RocketChips Inc.; Yu-Hao Lin of CoreEl Microsystems Inc.; Rodger Sykes of LogicVision Inc.; Yoram Solomon of Voyager Technologies Inc.; Mahest Tirupattur of Virtual Silicon Technology; and Jim White of Sierra Research and Technology.