ChipX Slashes Cost of System-on-Chip Development With Hybrid ASIC

Update: GigOptix, Inc. Announces Acquisition of ChipX (November 10, 2009)

Combines Performance and Cost Benefits of Standard Cell With NRE and Time-to-Market Benefits of Structured ASIC

December 18, 2007 -- ChipX, Inc., a mixed-signal ASIC company with the broadest ASIC offering, today announced the introduction of Hybrid ASIC, the implementation of a structured ASIC as IP on a Standard Cell device. This development approach allows for rapid and economical product line development, saving companies an average of three-to-five hundred thousand dollars in non-recurring engineering (NRE) and tooling costs and enabling them to introduce derivative products two-to-three months faster than today's methodologies allow.

A System-on-Chip (SoC) developed in Standard Cell technology results in the smallest device size and best performance, but it incurs significant up-front costs and long manufacturing lead times. Producing a series of custom products becomes capital intensive and often prohibitive for many companies. Structured ASICs solve the problem of high up-front costs and long lead times but the level of integration is often limited to available platforms and sizes. A ChipX Hybrid ASIC gives developers the benefits of Standard Cell and Structured ASICs without the tradeoffs. Turnaround time for logic changes can be as short as 6 weeks, from tape-out to packaged and tested prototypes with NREs starting as low as $99,000 in 0.13u.

"Designers of consumer multimedia products prefer to develop complete product families that give buyers a variety of choices. For example, one member of a video product line might have an H.264 CODEC only while another might add DivX," said Michelle Abraham, Principal Analyst, Multimedia. "Consumer electronic manufacturers could greatly benefit from a fast, inexpensive ASIC methodology that enabled them to implement multiple products, and rapidly enter and dominate new market segments."

"Hybrid ASICs allow our customers to build several generations of customized products or various derivatives quickly and effectively," said Elie Massabki, VP of Marketing at ChipX. "For the first time, we can offer a solution that slashes the cost of chip development without introducing compromises."

Typical applications for Hybrid ASIC include video compression or data encryption for designers who wish to implement the same device with different compression or encryption schemes. The implementation of an ASIC with a pre-standard interface or algorithm is also ideal for Hybrid ASIC. In these cases, the potentially variable design logic is placed in the configurable structured ASIC area. A proliferation of new products can quickly and easily be built by changing just the design in this area, without requiring additional work on the fixed portions of the design.

About Hybrid ASIC Technology

A Hybrid ASIC combines Standard Cell logic and I/Os, compiled memory and mixed-signal IP with a predefined configurable logic in a Structured ASIC core and configurable memory. The designer decides what functionality is built in the configurable portion of the chip and ChipX customizes a Structured ASIC IP core in any shape (rectangle, L-Shape, etc.) or size (50Kgates to 2M gates) desired for the section of the design likely to be altered in the future. Configurable memory blocks and configurable I/Os can also be inserted, offering various levels of flexibility and upgradeability. In the case of a derivative product, only the changing portion of the design needs to be processed. Consequently, development time can be reduced to a fraction of the initial development time -- typically tens or hundreds of thousand gates are processed instead of millions of gates -- the fabrication time can be reduced to a few layers of metal compared with 30 to 40 layers and the NRE cost is slashed by 70% or more.

Hybrid ASIC products are customer specific and can have up to 10M ASIC gates and 10Mb of memory. ChipX offers a wide range of IP, including PCI Express, USB 2.0 OTG, Video DAC and ADC, synthesizable processors from ARM(TM), Beyond Semiconductor, DDR/DDR2 PHYs and controllers, as well as over 200 blocks of synthesizable IP. Hybrid ASIC designs follow industry standard design flows and require only standard EDA tools. ChipX Hybrid ASIC is available in 0.13u CMOS process and designs can start immediately.

About ChipX

ChipX, Inc. is a mixed-signal ASIC company with the broadest offering of value-added ASIC solutions, including Standard Cell, Structured ASIC, Embedded Array and Hybrid ASIC technology. ChipX has unique expertise in PCI Express, USB 2.0, DDR/DDR2 and data conversion mixed-signal cores; all are silicon proven and certified and can be integrated in customers' ASICs with record first-time to market success. ChipX products are widely used in consumer equipment, computing peripherals, communication systems, instrumentation and industrial control, medical equipment and military/aerospace systems. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, ChipX is a privately held corporation, with a Research and Development subsidiary in Israel. Investors include Elron Electronic Industries, Ltd. (NASDAQ: ELRN), VantagePoint Venture Partners, Wasserstein Venture Capital, UMC and Needham Capital Partners.