Redefining Structured ASIC
eASIC's Better Idea

In most markets, there exist a set of de-facto rules. Sport-utility vehicles have bad fuel economy. Economy cars have limited cargo space. FPGAs use too much power. ASICs have staggering non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs. Generally, the players play by those rules, and the consumer enters every buying decision with a pre-defined understanding of the tradeoffs those rules imply and which basic option favors their situation. The final choice is then decided by a comparison of the less-critical factors that differentiate the products in each area. Once a design team has decided to go with a zero-NRE solution, for example, they typically find themselves comparing various FPGA offerings to find the one that best fits their needs.

Occasionally, however, someone breaks the rules. What if you could get an ASIC with near zero NRE? Would you still be locked into an FPGA solution? What if a structured ASIC offered you some degree of reprogrammability, or if you could vary the design on a small lot basis? Your decision approach, and even your entire design, might shift dramatically.

eASIC has announced its new FlexASIC family of structured ASIC devices that break the established rules. FlexASIC offers density, performance, and power consumption that come close to cell-based ASIC, with flexibility, NRE, and risk avoidance much closer to the FPGA end of the spectrum. This is accomplished by using an innovative architecture that combines FPGA-like look up table (LUT) cells connected by metal routing that is customized by a single via layer. This single via layer can be e-beam programmed for small production runs, or mask programmed for higher volumes.

An additional advantage of the e-beam programming approach is the ability to easily segment wafers, putting multiple design variants on a single wafer. This eliminates minimum volume requirements and ultimately lowers unit costs as a single production lot can be shared across many designs. While e-beam has suffered a somewhat dubious reputation in the past for impractical levels of performance, eASIC points out that their use of e-beam is comparatively fast because only a single via layer is being customized. When it comes time to go to production, no requalification is necessary because the mask-customized version will be identical to the e-beam version.

From a security perspective, FlexASIC also offers the best of both worlds. The via-based routing makes reverse-engineering of the routing fabric extremely difficult, and because the logic is bitstream programmed, the device itself does not contain the entire design until runtime. Potential thieves would have to recreate both elements to have a viable copy of the design. [more]

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