"Silicon Intellectual Property" ("SIP", "Silicon IP") is a business model for a semiconductor company where it licenses its technology to a customer as intellectual property. A company with such a business model is a fabless semiconductor company, which doesn't provide physical chips to its customers but merely facilitates the customer's development of chips by offering certain functional blocks. Typically, the customers are semiconductor companies or module developers with in-house semiconductor development. A company wishing to fabricate a complex device may license in the rights to use another company's well-tested functional blocks such as a microprocessor, instead of developing their own design, which would require additional time and cost.