Long touted as a silver bullet, IP reuse often fails to live up to expectations when it comes to increasing semiconductor R&D productivity and throughput . That’s because most IC development teams fail to recognize a critical non-linear relationship exists between the amount of circuitry they modify or “improve” in pre-existing IP blocks and the effort the engineering team expends in making those modified blocks operate properly in the target IC. Bottom line: small changes can have a disproportionate impact on project effort. Not being fully cognizant of the specifics of this non-linear behavior is a common trap into which myriad engineering teams unwittingly fall. [More]