Consumer Electronics ASIC

By Webmaster

Consumer Electronics ASIC Solutions

Triad Semiconductor designs and manufactures custom ICs for consumer electronics applications.

Consumer Electronics ASIC Solutions by Triad Semiconductor

The Demanding Consumer Electronics Design Environment

If you are designing consumer electronics, you know you are in a demanding market. You are being asked to simultaneously address these often conflicting requirements

  • Add more and more features while,
  • Keeping production cost low (fractions of a penny matter)
  • Reduce size, weight and power consumption
  • And, get the product developed as fast as possible

Triad Semiconductor is the fast and cost effective way to get custom ICs working and to production

All we do is design and manufacture custom analog and mixed signal ASIC solutions. We are not distracted by standard product development. We focus exclusively on helping you protect your IP in cost optimized silicon enabling you to differentiate yourself from the competition.

  • We’ve assembled an excellent design team of IC designers. We have over 600 years of combined design experience and our designers, on average, each have more than 18+ years of IC design experience.
  • We utilize best-in-class EDA tools for IC design supported by a robust and redundant revision control and archival infrastructure with servers in multiple physical locations.
  • You gain access to a world-class supply chain including strong foundry relationships with TSMC, SMIC, MagnaChip and AMS.
  • Our package assembly and test partners deliver high quality results and help us to rapidly ramp your product to sustainable high volume production.
  • We deliver to you products of high quality and reliability. We are ISO certified and we have a heritage of delivering mission-critical high-rel parts to aerospace, defense, medical, industrial, automotive and consumer markets.

Consumer Electronics ASIC Solutions by Triad Semiconductor

Full Custom ICs Solutions for Consumer Electronics

We design full custom analog and mixed signal ASICs to your specifications. Our architects and design team are experts at translating your domain expertise into optimized CMOS circuits. Your design will take advantage of our extensive circuit IP library developed over the past thirteen years. Our IP library includes silicon proven IP for:

  • Power management
  • Sensor interface
  • Analog signal conditioning
  • Data Converters
  • ARM Cortex-Family (M0, M3, M4) Processors
  • Non-volatile memory
  • Custom digital circuits
  • Communication interfaces

(see a more extensive list of Triad’s circuit design expertise here).

Agile ASIC™

In addition to full custom consumer electronics ASIC solutions, Triad offers Agile ASIC solutions. An Agile ASIC contains full custom circuits that are enhanced with reconfigurability. 

Agile ASIC Benefits

  • Fastest possible time to prototype – you can go from kickoff to working silicon in 60 days
  • Industry’s fastest respin time – you can respin parts in 30 days
  • Fastest possible time to market – you can prototype, respin and ramp to volume production in 10 months

What is an Agile ASIC?

An Agile ASIC starts with full custom, optimized circuits designed to meet your specifications. Agile ASIC circuits are overlaid with Triad’s patented routing fabric. Your entire design can be configured and interconnected on an Agile ASIC by changing a single mask layer. The mask layer that is changed is the via layer between the routing fabric layers.
Triad has an expansive and growing library of circuits combined with fabric that we refer to as tiles. Your Agile ASIC is a combination of silicon-proven tiles and tiles created for your application to uniquely satisfy your requirements.
 
All full custom ASICs have unused silicon area. A full custom designer optimizes his block to minimize local silicon area. This approach often results in amorphous shapes that do not fit well together at final chip assembly.
 
Agile ASICs reclaim the wasted silicon area with reconfigurable resources. At the local circuit level, an Agile ASIC designer creates resistors, capacitors, transistors and other useful circuits as arrayed collections of resources and spare resources. Silicon area that would normally be wasted in a full custom design is reclaimed with spare resources. All of these resources are overlaid with routing fabric allowing circuits to be quickly fixed or refined by making ViaOnly™ single mask layer changes.

An Agile ASIC can fix problems in hours and days that can take weeks and months in a traditional full-custom-only design.

 

Are Agile ASICs Cost Effective for High Volume Consumer Applications?

Yes, Agile ASICs are the cost effective consumer electronics ASIC solution. We have customers shipping 50-million Agile ASICs per year where saving fractions of a penny is important. Customers are using Agile ASICs to beat the competition to market with low cost solutions.

Triad Semiconductor's Agile ASICs are the fastest way to make custom ICs

Photo courtesy of dvdmnk(CC Attribution)

Should I Choose an Agile ASIC or Full Custom Only?

Triad’s ASIC architects will work with you come up with a custom IC solution optimized for your exact needs and application. We do provide customers with full-custom only solutions. All of our designers are full-custom IC design experts. We are finding that for more and more applications you will be best served by a custom IC solution that includes some amount of Agile ASIC capabilities. Some customers ship high volume circuits that are 100% Agile (via reconfigurable). Other customers utilize what we call Focused Agile ASICs™, where part of the design is traditional full-custom and part of the design is reconfigurable. An embedded processor such as a Cortex-M0 or Cortex-M4 is most always hardened as a standard cell implementation. Likewise, stable digital functions may be implemented as standard cell only. In a Focused Agile ASIC, you might decide to have the digital all standard-cell while the analog circuits remain fully agile. This approach allows for rapid refinement of analog circuit performance and significantly improves mixed signal ASIC respin time and time to market.

Consumer Electronics ASIC Productization & High Volume Production

Our operations team is here to help you introduce and ramp your design to high volume production. Collectively our team has shipped over 2-billion production devices. We learned high volume production ramp in the cellphone industry long before such fast production ramps were common. 

 

We manage the entire semiconductor supply chain from introduction to high volume

  • Extensive network of relationships in all phases of the semiconductor supply chain
  • Design for test and design for yield expertise
  • Multi-site, multi-company supply chain redundancy capability for continuity of supply planning
  • Domestic and international test development resources to speed product introduction
  • Access to a wide variety of wafer probing and final assembly test options

[optin title=”Request a Quote on Your ASIC” text=”Provide us with your contact information and a Triad ASIC engineer will contact you to discuss getting your design ideas implemented as your own custom ASIC.” buttontext=”Submit” successMessage=”Message has been submitted successfully.” errorMessage=”Failed to send your message. Please try later.” invalidEmailMessage=”Your email address does not appear valid.” border=”false” collectfirstname=”true” collectlastname=”true” collectphone=”false” collectcompany=”true”]