The Growing Semiconductor IP Business Question And Answer With Larry Morrell, Impinj

Having shipped more than 500 million AEON nonvolatile memory (NVM) cores, Impinj, Inc. has a lot to say about the growing semiconductor IP business. As part of our ongoing effort to report on hot new industry developments, Semiconductor Online caught up with Larry Morrell, vice president and general manager of Impinj's IP Products Group, to get his thoughts on this evolving chip market segment.

Question: Why has Impinj been so successful licensing its semiconductor IP?

Two words: Customer commitment. It really helps that we picked a fast growing market—nonvolatile memory—and have a proven, patented technology.

Impinj's philosophy is one of delighting the customer. We deliver what we say can, when we say it will be there, and it does what it is supposed to do. When there are issues, questions, or concerns of any kind, we do whatever it takes to keep the customer on track. As a result, the market uptake has been excellent. Impinj's AEON NVM is ideal for a number of "hot" system-chip applications including digital rights management, power management, and analog trim. All of these applications need the small amounts of high-performance NVM that AEON NVM provides. We've also seen a significant up-tick lately from chip designers serving the consumer electronics market who are looking for a viable replacement for older memory technologies such as EEPROM and Flash.

About Larry Morrell
Larry Morrell is a semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) and system-on-chip (SoC) design expert with more than 20 years of semiconductor industry experience with early-stage and established companies. Involved in many semiconductor industry innovations such as the launch of field programmable gate array (FPGA) methodologies and the first USB chips, Morrell was a founding member of the international standards body and trade association, PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) and is a champion of logic nonvolatile memory SIP market initiatives. He earned a B.S. in Computer and Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Russian Languages from New Mexico State University.