“A technology looking for a problem” Can we apply search concepts to “rank” Semiconductor Intellectual Property?

It's all about attitude, stubbornness, and establishing new paradigms

While much of the appreciation for this blog topic is restricted to semiconductor component design, by the end of the story, I hope to bring this back into the context of generalized intellectual property distribution in cloud computing enterprise architectures.

Those of us who have been in R&D have either heard of or designed “technologies or solutions that are looking for a problem.” Those of us that have been entrepreneurs also know that “solutions looking for a problem don’t get funded.” (http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/2010/11/solutions-looking-for-problem-dont-get.html) However, I was only a couple of hours into my latest audio book, “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives”, by Steven Levy, when I was continually reminded of just how many indirect network effects have been spawned out of Google’s obsession with the problem of “SEARCH”.

Solutions looking for problems!

What could certainly have been at first glance classified by most computer scientists as a “bounded problem”, Larry Page & Sergey Brin have managed to not only to profitably legitimize the problem of “search” for interesting web pages, but have managed to somehow indirectly integrate it into practically every facet of our lives! Okay, that last part is stretching it a bit, but sometimes it does seem like Google is everywhere.

Our past experiences in life always jade our thinking and perceptions, and my life as a chip designer certainly influences my “mind broadening” diatribes as well. The problem I’m challenging those reading this blog to think about is intertwined into my previous blog on Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) in “the Cloud”, aka, “Snakes On A Plane!”

Present day semiconductor component architectures, Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), rely heavily upon previously designed and verified functional modules, often obtained from 3rd parties in exchange for licensing or royalty fees. When a single SIP design flaw could mean the demise of a chip company’s reputation or business, the fear that chip designers and architects have when integrating a 3rd party SIP module goes viral. The problem that the wary chip engineer has when assessing the worth of any SIP module is effectively a SEARCH problem!

That’s right, I said it, it’s a search problem! The engineer is searching for the answer to the question of whether that SIP block is worthy to be integrated on the chip, i.e. if there are bugs in the SIP, where are they and how bad can they be? What are the risks? The focus of this blog entry is, can we assign a “rank” to an SIP module in a similar or tangentially related manner to the ranking of Web pages, i.e. and SIPRank? To an experienced design engineer, such an attempt to design an automaton to quantify the value of a digital function may seem absurd, and I fully appreciate that healthy skepticism. And while initial attempts at defining SIPRanks will be crude, over time, just as the exponential expansion of Google’s web page database continued to refine, test, challenge, and improve Google’s search algorithms and subsequent results, an increasingly large data sampling of SIP will provide a similar proxy for defining and effective SIPRank algorithm.

More to come…