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“Easics: excellence in chip design”
17
Easics: excellence in chip design
EASICS NV is a company specialized in the design
of embedded digital systems, ranging from FPGAs,
digital and mixed-signal ASICs, to entire Systemson-Chip, including embedded software.
effectively prolonging the “expiry date” of the
created intellectual property with several years.
And this in spite of oftentimes new and “in flux”
standards and requirements.
The picture below showcases the hardware : the
FPGA as the cornerstone, surrounded by SRAM
and DRAM memories.
EASICS is active for customers worldwide in the
following markets :
With the advent of 65nm FPGAs (and 45nm
soon to follow), Systems-on-Chip can finally be
implemented using FPGAs, boasting performance,
power and cost metrics that are comparable to
competitive ASIC technology in 180nm, and yet
retaining full flexibility and zero production-NRE
costs. This is another area that EASICS excels in,
for both ASIC protoyping and FPGA-based final
products.
Wanted
Success stories
EASICS NV was founded in 1991, as a spin-off
from IMEC and the ESAT department of the
University of Leuven, Belgium.
• Industrial Automation & Machine construction
• Wired Telecom
• Wireless Telecom
• Consumer Electronics
Customers are evenly spread between Belgium,
the rest of Europe, and the USA.
Besides offering chip design services, EASICS
licenses intellectual property in two areas :
• Hardware building blocks such
as memory controllers and multiprocessor architectures, shortening our
customers’ time-to-market, and
• EDA (electronic design automation)
sofware tools, empowering designengineers to build digital systems
more efficiently, notably in the areas
of hardware/software co-design and
verification
Methodology
EASICS keeps an open mind when it comes
to selecting target technologies for our
customers’ chips. In our feasibility studies we
offer independent advice on both technical and
economical parameters. Starting from there we
work closely together with the customer, finetuning the requirements and architecture so as to
create excellent value.
Our unparallelled understanding of connectivity
protocols (such as IP, ATM, SONET/SDH, Ethernet
and USB) as well as our demonstrated ability
to integrate critical digital and analog functions
on a single chip, made Tego, Inc (Waltham, MA,
USA) select EASICS to implement its RFID
(Radio Frequency Identification) tag product
line. Our team quickly implemented a working
tag, compliant to EPCglobal Gen-2 UHF, and we
added a number of compelling features. EASICS
designed both FPGA prototype and ASIC. In this
success story, EASICS teamed up with ICsense,
tapping on their analog design expertise.
EASICS’ expertise in architecting and designing
Systems-on-Chip for Digital Signal Processing
applications, was recently applied in an FPGAbased system for BEST NV (Leuven, Belgium),
performing real-time image processing for an
industrial
sor ting
machine.
EASICS’ sixteen-year long chip design-expertise
covers Connectivity, Multi-processor architectures,
and Digital Signal Processing.
Leveraging our technology-independent approach,
EASICS helps the customer realize his roadmap,
be it for ASSP, ASIC or FPGA-based products.
The future is taken into account from day one,
FPGA- based system, surrounded by SRAM and DRAM
memories, performing real-time image processing for an
industrial sorting machine.
EASICS is hiring new engineering talent. If you have
a university degree in electronics or computer
science, don’t hesitate to contact us. Expertise
in C++, Linux, Hardware description languages,
Telecom protocols and Digital Signal Processing
is a plus.
Contact information:
EASICS NV
Ramses Valvekens, CEO
Arenberg Science Park
Gaston Geenslaan 9
3001 Leuven, Belgium
http://www.easics.com
ramses@easics.be
tel +32 16 395 613