Product Development
Higher levels of performance, reduced costs and increased differentiation - a custom silicon solution offers genuine competitive advantages.
For companies looking to get new products to market the use of general purpose silicon can be a viable solution. A custom silicon solution, however, goes further, delivering a significantly stronger competitive advantage for your business. Based on Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) or Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), custom solutions maximise performance levels, reduce costs and increase your product differentiation.
EnSilica specialises in developing such custom hardware, utilising ASIC and FPGA technologies. As an independent company, we are able to select the best technology for you, based on key requirements such as product features, volumes or power, and evaluate the trade-offs between FPGA and ASIC throughout the product life-cycle. In many cases a standard part with a FPGA can deliver the necessary differentiation for the initial product. As the production volumes increase however, an ASIC solution with lower unit cost can offer significantly improved profitability.
Field programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
Field programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices are now very much mainstream technology, EnSilica have designed FPGA solutions for customers working in markets as diverse as networking, broadcast, automotive, defence and aerospace. The built-in functionality in modern FPGA devices coupled with the FPGA vendors or third party IP allows complex functionality to be included in the device. This can range from embedded processors and DSPs to high-speed interfaces such as PCI Express and Gigabit Ethernet. The high level of integration offered by today's FPGAs increases reliability, provides protection to product cloning and can provide significant differentiation to those products developed with off-the-shelf parts.
Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC)
The use of ASIC technology will provide the highest performance, lowest unit cost and lowest-power solution for your product – but the production volumes need to be at the appropriate level to offset the NRE associated with the ASIC development. However, by careful selection of the most appropriate ASIC technology, it might well be the most cost-effective solution for volumes below 10,000 units per year.
Even low-cost FPGA can still cost tens to hundreds of dollars per part. Using mature ASIC technologies or structured ASIC the NRE can be reduced to between $75k to $250k and unit costs could be as low as $1 for a full ASIC solution to several dollars for a gate-array solution. EnSilica can provide a foundry independent service to identify the right choice of technology for your product.
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