IP block (silicon IP)
Beginner
A ready-made piece of chip design, bought or reused, so a team doesn’t have to design every part from scratch.
Novice
A ready-made design block licensed from a supplier, reused from an earlier chip or taken from open source: processor cores, interconnect, memory controllers, PHYs (the mostly analog circuits that drive signals on and off the chip), memory generators. It comes as hardware-description code (soft IP) or as a finished layout (hard IP).
Expert
Make-or-buy weighs differentiation, schedule, license fees and royalties, verification quality, configurability and integration risk: protocol versions, clocking, test hooks and power intent must all match the rest of the chip. Hard IP also fixes its shape and pin positions in the floorplan.