What does the abbreviation IP in "System-on-Chip (SoC) infrastructure IP applications" stand for?

Question

I'm looking at a Texas Instruments datasheet, and noticed the phrase:

"System-on-Chip (SoC) infrastructure IP applications"

and was just wondering what IP stands for.

Answer 1

As already mentioned by Chetan, it stands for "Intellectual Property".

This Wikipedia article should make the context clearer:

In electronic design a semiconductor intellectual property core, IP core, or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or chip layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores may be licensed to another party or can be owned and used by a single party alone.

Answer 2

In this particular context IP stands for Intellectual Property

Answer 3

IP can stand for:

• Intellectual Property
• Internet Protocol
• Many, many, many other things.

In this case, it's probably Internet Protocol. Basically, they're saying their device is good for Internet-enabled applications. Saying a device is "IP-enabled" generally means it has the processing power/integrated peripherals to handle communicating over the internet easily.

Answer 4

My best guess here is Intellectual Property as others have already mentioned. If you want to know for sure, please provide a reference to the datasheet.

In ASIC design terms: modular, license-able, on-chip component designs can be referred to as "IP cores" that other companies can purchase and integrate into their own ASIC. Since ASICs are described with HDL languages, ASIC components can be surprisingly portable across several different designs. The reference to "SoC infrastructure" seems to suggest this, but again, please provide more context for a better answer.

Some examples of IP cores that you can buy and integrate into your ASIC design may be memory controllers, entire CPU's (Xilinx microblaze and others), peripheral blocks, etc. There are companies that make entire businesses out of selling licenses for IP cores.