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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Products would make them prohibitively expensive and physically impossible to carry in our purses or pockets. Every automobile contains dozens of ASIC chips for everything from climate control to airbag deployment; suspension control to entertainment systems. ASICs also play important roles in applications for hospital medical equipment, eMeters, home appliances such as washers and dryers, scuba gear, hearing aids, and much more. Picking an ASIC design partner The analog ASIC market is huge. In fact, research firm IC Insights reports that almost 60% of the nearly $37B of analog ICs sold in 2010 were ASICs. Yet very few mixed-signal ASIC design houses fully understand the implications of custom analog design and its applicability to analog-centric ASICs. ASICs requiring high analog content should be directed to those design houses that specialize in analog circuit design rather than those who simply select analog IP blocks from a library. Analog ASIC companies have large staffs of competent, experienced, analog engineers with expertise in a wide range of analog functions. Reviewing an ASIC house’s patent portfolio as a quick guide as to the creativity of its engineering team will serve as a first order measure of its analog expertise. Clearly, the large analog IC houses (like ADI, Linear Tech, Maxim, National, TI) have patent portfolios a mile deep. Those that also engage in analog ASIC development set high bars regarding who can access this capability and impose high minimum order requirements. For example, TI reports that their application-specific analog business focuses on a small
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