Industry Expert Blogs

I am often asked about the differences between ASICs, FPGAs, and ASIC-with-embedded FPGA (eFPGA) blocks and so I thought I would devote a blog article to that topic. Here goes…

Embedded FPGA soft eFPGA IP

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Once upon a time, there were ASICs (“Application Specific Integrated Circuits”, for the uninitiated). These were (and are) semiconductor devices designed to implement a very specific set of functions for a particular application. Ironically, ASICs tend to be developed for a customer-specific application, so one could argue they should actually be called CSICs. ASICs can be highly integrated yet still have a relatively small die size, which means their users get a lot of functionality and low per-unit costs. Because ASICs implement their functionality in hardware and are so highly integrated, they can also deliver high performance or run at very low levels of power consumption. Those factors have made ASICs into a multi-billion dollar per year industry.

The downsides of ASICs are that they can be expensive and time-consuming to produce, and they lack flexibility. That lack of flexibility means that design fixes or changes are difficult, time-consuming and expensive – especially at leading-edge process geometries.

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