Orca Launches ORC5000 Platform for Low-Power ASIC Designs

Digital RF Innovator’s ASIC Design Platform Brings Significant Power-Saving Benefits and Performance Enhancements for Power-Sensitive Applications

SAN DIEGO, Calif., Mar. 8, 2023 – Satellite 2023 – Orca Systems, a fabless semiconductor company delivering groundbreaking digital RF technology, has introduced a highly integrated ASIC platform that significantly improves system performance and reduces power consumption for power-sensitive space, terrestrial, industrial and edge computing applications. Orca’s new ORC5000 ASIC platform has been applied to develop Orca’s first ASIC product, the ORC5990, designed for use in low-Earth orbit (LEO) IoT satellite payload and terrestrial IoT gateway designs. The company’s custom ASIC design, modem expertise and integration capabilities offer 10x performance enhancements over conventional FPGA-based system design with only a fraction of the power consumption.

Orca Systems’ technology assets in the RF, analog, DSP and power management domains serve as building blocks and key elements of the ORC5000 ASIC platform. Orca’s innovative systems architecture and semiconductor design expertise have enabled the company to build custom ASIC and RF SoC solutions that precisely meet customer performance/power/area needs. This high level of specialization, spanning initial system architecture to final production, makes Orca Systems’ ORC5000 platform the clear choice when compared to conventional implementations using FPGA and other discrete components. Orca ASICs are extremely energy efficient by design, making them an optimal solution to meet the stringent energy budgets of power-sensitive applications.

“Conventional implementations using discrete components or FPGAs are not optimized to meet the application-specific needs of today’s low-power system designs, resulting in higher power consumption and costly overhead and features,” said John McDonough, CEO of Orca Systems. “Orca Systems has the custom ASIC and RF SoC design expertise to address our customers’ performance, power and board area requirements and deliver solutions that significantly reduce total cost of ownership. Our design capabilities also include development and integration of complex RF, analog and digital IP from our partners and customers.”

The ORC5000 ASIC platform based on the GF 22FDX® platform has significant advantages for use in LEO satellite payloads due to its low power consumption and low susceptibility to latch-up and single event effects (SEE). The new platform also uses GF’s eMRAM technology in the application CPU subsystem, which enables low power and reduced soft-error rate and improves reliability for satellite communications.

About the ORC5000 ASIC Platform

The ORC5000 ASIC’s highly integrated design achieves significant improvements in power consumption for a wide range of applications. The ASIC platform is designed for highly complex, multi-channel modem and signal processor integration. It supports an internal PHY for access to large external LPDDR4x memory for samples or other large data set storage tasks. The LPDDR4x PHY with low-voltage operation enables low power consumption, which is critical for power-sensitive designs.

The ASIC platform’s flexible serial peripheral interface (SPI) enables gigabit data throughput with an external microcontroller or external flash memory. The platform also supports mixed-signal integration including an analog PLL for generating high-speed clocks for the DDR PHY, high-speed digital circuits and other peripherals. Depending on the custom design requirements, power management circuits (e.g. DC-DC convertors and LDOs), memories (e.g. NVM and SRAM) and peripheral interfaces such as UART and USB can be integrated into the ORC5000 ASIC platform.

The low-power ORC5000 ASIC platform supports an ambient industrial temperature range of -40 °C to +85 °C and enables exceptional system cost savings, efficient power system design, and reduced peripherical component count and PCB area.

For more information, visit www.orcasystems.com.

About Orca Systems

Orca Systems is a champion of always live wireless connectivity, delivering a groundbreaking low-power digital RF transceiver portfolio for the exploding IoT semiconductor market. Patented Orca Live Wireless RF™ digital radio and digital power amplifier (DPA) technology provide ultra-low power consumption to extend the battery life of IoT devices. Silicon-proven Orca Live Wireless RF™ digital transceivers are available to select customers as IP cores, known good die (KGD), and packaged integrated circuits. IP cores are optimized for integration into SoC devices for the lowest cost, smallest silicon area, and lowest power IoT SoC products. Orca Systems is headquartered in San Diego, California, with an exceptional research and development center and state-of-the-art lab facility in Bangalore, India.