ASIC Design Services

Many companies realise the benefits of incorporating part or all of their design into a highly integrated customised integrated circuit for the purposes of cost-reduction, space saving, or specification enhancement. However, despite the more obvious benefits, many companies are cautious about taking this step primarily because of (a) the high initial investment required in engineering tools and software and (b) the fear of "getting it wrong" and having a non-working chip for a variety of reasons.

With the above in mind, FTDI has set up it's own in-house i.c. design facility to offer a turn-key service for the design of Application Specific Integrated Circuits ( ASICs ).

We have our own vendor-independent design tools in house and can design i.c.'s ranging in complexity from a few hundred gates to over one hundred thousand gates. We developed our own CAE tools ( simulation and verification software ) as a result of wishing to improve on the commercial products available on the market, allowing us a high degree of productivity when debugging designs and generating test vectors for the finished devices. Using FTDI's design facility saves our customers the up-front costs of purchasing or leasing their own design tools.

Our tools and design methodology have been well proven in the field. Over the past four years, we have designed more than a dozen such devices, all of which have proven functional at first test. Our customers have varied between small companies looking for integration of their existing designs to large multi-national corporations looking for highly integrated P.C. chip sets tailored to their specific requirements.

We can offer a fast turnaround service for customers wishing to convert existing PAL and FPGA devices to custom ASIC chips.

The high volume business we achieve in the PC chip set market allows us to source our silicon from major foundries at competitive prices and fast turnaround times.