Design Reuse is part of the solution to closing the widening gap between what is possible to implement in Silicon and what is practical to design with current design methodologies and tools. The question that this paper tries to address is how you ensure that you can get a reasonable return on the extra investment, over normal design, that is required to make a design re-useable.

This paper analyses some of the factors that affect the economic success of reusing designs. It is important to realize is that design reuse is a process, which has to be refined in order to improve; it is not a single event or decision that enables a step change in design efficiency.