Digital and analogue microASIC

Fast prototyping is a very important process in the pre-manufacturing flow to both customer and the semiconductor supplier. The customer having defined the system is then eager to test the initial prototype of the system. This is fine for systems that can use standard components which are freely available and will not hold up a project. However, fast prototyping is very important if time to market to the customer is required, especially if custom digital and analogue is required. More and more engineers in Europe are using ASICs. This is important as the cost reduction is now coming from semiconductor integration rather than in the good old days when printed circuit board layout was the easy cost reduction path. Large companies are using ASICs. FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are an excellent way of building the digital part of the system. If the product is mostly digital with simple analog then everything is fine. However, if price is the issue then a mixed mode ASIC will win on volume every time. Further problems come when the customer requires a breadboard built with FPGAs but the analogue section is high performance. The final product may have a specification requiring RFI to be very low and the problem may be compounded by dimensional constraints. A microASIC is often required