DDT: Are IP cores supposed to work out of the box?

Too much turkey over the Thanksgiving break would have dulled the senses a little, if not for the sobering arrival of our November's story from a reader in Japan.

(Translated)

"We are a design contractor implementing FPGA projects for clients. In the summer of 2007, we received a request for a system that uses PCI. As we did not have our own PCI IP core at that time, we decided to purchase one from a major IP provider.

The sales engineer kindly gave us a working reference design and development board for that IP core.

However, because of reasons that we never managed to figure out, the PCI core would fail place-and-route, or fail to work in actual hardware at certain times.

After our engineering team debugged it for a month, we finally asked the IP vendor for assistance. Their engineers were very apologetic and tried their best to help, however because their development team was not based in Japan, response was slow.

Eventually, we had to give up on the project and ask the client for their forgiveness.

To this day, we do not know what was wrong with the PCI IP core, but we have since developed our own."

-- "d_oni", design consultant