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left to right: Pavel Vilk - Director of Engineering, Avnet ASIC;
Frank Hansen - Regional Vice President Central & East Europe,
Avnet Silica; Yulia Milshtein - Director of Operations and Business
Development, Avnet ASIC; Yair Sahar - Technical Team Nanager,
Avnet Israel
therefore customer should be able to
freeze the design. Time to market is
1-1.5 years to mass production and
initial NRE budget is required.
With ASIC you will optimize your
product unit price, power, area and
BOM.
Replace your FPGA as a cost
reduction for mass production
Replace your board by a single SoC
(integrate CPU, DSP, Custom logic,
Memories, MIPI, PCIe, USB, SerDes, RF
front end, LDO, DC2DC, ADC/DAC, NFC
and CAN PHY, High voltage cuircuits)
Replace End of Life with a Pin
Compatible solution".
The synergy with Avnet Sil
i
ca
Yulia: "ASIC is a high volume oriented
product, in some cases customer that
designed with Avnet based on FGPA
or ASSP, will encounter price issue
while ramping to high volume, or will
need to optimized power or area that
can’t be reached using FPGA. In this
case, simple Return on Investment
calculation can show that ASIC NRE
investment will be returned in few
years, and the saving in the long
term will be huge. This enables Avnet
to enhance its line card with custom
devices and that allow maximum
optimization and IP protection. A
second scenario is System in Package
(SiP) – miniaturization of existing
customer board into a single package
with several dies. Due to the ASIC
mass production capabilities, we
have a very strong packaging and
test team and collaboration with
Avnet enables access to bare dies
of many vendors. This offering is
unique, because any other SiP vendor
has to find each die separately. SiP
solutions usually very attractive for
area saving and power improvement,
their NRE is relatively low and time
to market is fast. A third scenario is
pin compatible replacement for end
of life situations, when one of the
vendors announces obsolescence
for of his devices. In such case the
longevity of the system is extended
and secured, without going into
risky and long redevelopment of the
hardware and software."
Value to customer
While the traditional ASIC vendors
are locked to specific manufacturer
and technology. Avnet ASIC Israel
has a different philosophy - we do
not bound ourselves by technology
or specific vendor. We are fabless and
our focus is to maintain very strong
network of Tier One Partners: IP and
manufacturing, we are an authorized
design center for most of them.
Such approach enables us to build
a unique solution, optimizing the
specific targets of the customer. Our
technical pre-sale team is experienced
in understanding the unique needs of
the markets we focus on, analyzing
the tradeoff between technical
solutions and cost, finding the right
recipes for each customer – Silicon
technology, IPs, Packaging. Whether
it is low power for wearables, cost
reduction for Consumer market or
reliability for Automotive.
markets today require very small
footprint, low power and low cost
unique and secure systems, and the
ASIC is the best choice for these
applications.
Automotive and ADAS car systems,
Infotainment and Connected Car
Wearables and Hand-Held devices
IoT devices (sensors, metering, etc.)
Consumer products (AR/VR, Drones,
Gesture Recognition)
Industrial Applications (Robots, Valve
Control, Vision systems)
Bio Medical (Attached to Body or
Wrist, Implantable sensors and
broadcasters) ".
ASIC decision points
I asked Pavel - What are typical
conditions to start ASIC project?
When should customer ask himself
about ASIC? His answers were:
"It’s hard to generalize, but I will
provide some rules of thumb. If the
application is industrial I would check
ASIC ROI (Return on Investment)
starting 20K/Year, in commercial
around 200K/Year. There are some
additional conditions - unlike the
FPGA ASIC is not field programmable,
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