The competitive pressure for time-to-market and the tremendous integration capacity provided by the silicon technology developers has raised the promise of systems-on-a-chip. This inescapable evolution however increases the need for cost effective design methodologies and solutions, and the electronic engineering and design community is now firmly convinced that it can not be accomplished without a systematic use of already designed and qualified components, in a similar approach to the one already familiar to software developers. Complex system functions, improperly named IPs, are delivered by ASIC suppliers, created by the customer or developed by independent specialized companies, and offered to system designers, in the form of dedicated predesigned circuit blocks, allowing them to best use their expertise and creativity and finally keep pace with the dramatic productivity challenge required to make the system level silicon a reality.