“In Your Face” IP
Sometimes it’s amazing that anything works. Take the recent “Occupy” demonstrations (and let’s not extend it to the “Arab Spring” unless we have to). Any given metropolitan police department will have good, if complex, interior communications and a proven chain of command. Any given small group of demonstrators won’t, but can stay coordinated, kind of, within yelling distance.
However, when you add social media to these diffuse demonstrations, they suddenly become scalable to paralyzing size, though headless or million-headed depending on your point of view. To scale up near as far, police need complex additions to their communication, legal protocols, cross-jurisdictional protocols, command protocols, interagency training, and lots of time. Swarms happen and will be happening far more often, while policing has to be planned or else the reaction to unanticipated scaling becomes disabling inaction (Watts) or violent reaction (Chicago 1968).
Following the analogy, chip Interface IP can (usually will, but not should) be specific—efficiently planned to handle anticipated demands, or general—relying on design standards and conventions that will be far less efficient, but can be more elastically applied. Think of it as String Theory for chips, the universes get smaller but their clouds of possibility continue to grow.
Of course, a complex IP that leave no room for the actual functional IP would be a non-starter. Social Media for IP would have to be either a Fuzzy “applier,” EDA that sizes down to fit the specifics and keeps updating as the SoC design develops, or a Fuzzy chip interface that adapts to a probable/possible range of needs. The final SoC would be frozen in time unless it was something like an FPGA. In which case my Fuzzy Programmable Gate Array (FZPGA for short) would continue to have adaptability to handle a staggering matrix of unintended special cases as required.
Or not. Admittedly I’m sketching away on a napkin and trying to think of a better way to get you to pay for the coffee and scone. Remind me to tell you about my plan for 4th Dimensional stacking in a chip or device. It’s verging now on possibility and is, I think, inevitable.