IIC Journal of Innovation 10th Edition | Page 43

Keeping Ahead of the Curve with Custom ASICs mentioned previously, the sensors can run off battery power and therefore power budgets available for processing circuitry can be demanding. Implementing a solution with discrete components while meeting demanding power budgets can be difficult. have opened up for lower-volume products. This means that custom ASICs are now possible for many companies who would previously have found such designs out of their budgets. Even what seems like a moderately simple printed circuit board can contain hundreds of components. Add to this the overhead associated with specifying, purchasing and testing, the time and cost can be considerable in choosing to go the discrete component path. And this is all before you consider risks of obsolescence and security of your intellectual property. C USTOM S OLUTIONS E NABLING THE E DGE The arrival of the Industrial Internet of Things has placed many demands on technology. We need to be able to monitor the data from large numbers of sensors which can be in space-constrained locations, working on battery power and with communications latency issues. Ideally, the sensors used would produce an electric signal that is directly proportional to the physical quantity that is being measured and therefore would allow a linear transfer function. However, this is not the case and the ideal sensor does not exist 12 . Therefore, we need to be able to monitor the sensor with better-than-ever accuracy, allow for these inherent non-idealities of sensors, react to the information received, and perform key functions based off that information. And then we need to be able to quickly store the data required in the cloud to be accessed whenever it is needed. With a custom ASIC, you can integrate all your analog and digital circuitry onto one single piece of silicon. Added to that you can include a microprocessor or microcontroller, memory (Flash and SRAM), various interfaces and wired or wireless communication protocols. Integration can give major surface area size savings – for example, a custom off-the-shelf 12-bit Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) discrete component may have a physical area of 10mm 2 . The same DAC with equivalent performance integrated into a custom chip occupies just 0.1mm 2 . Later in this article we will share case studies that show how customers have achieved 80-90% area savings on their systems by using custom silicon versus discrete component solutions. Integration Custom silicon was historically considered the luxury of high-volume shipments. However, since advanced semiconductor nodes track consumer high-volume segments, the more mature process nodes 12 https://bit.ly/2RMudWh - 39 - March 2019