Leuven, Belgium, November 22, 2010 – Easics, a leader in digital ASIC and FPGA design and ICsense, a leading analog IC design house, today announced a partnership agreement. By joining their expertise, the two design houses can now offer their customers high-quality, best-of-class mixed-signal ASIC applications. With the agreement, Easics and ICsense formalize a longstanding collaboration that has already produced a number of successful ASIC designs.
Experts forecast a growing role for mixed-signal ASICs, as more and more applications require integration of all digital and analog functionality in one chip for size, power and cost reasons. Typical applications are sensing, data acquisition, communication and power management combined with custom digital and data processing for medical, environmental, industrial and consumer markets.
“IC design houses often have their roots in either digital or analog chip design.” said Ramses Valvekens, CEO of Easics. “They lack the skills, experience and tools for the other domain. Yet, the marketplace increasingly demands integrated mixed-signal ASIC solutions. We formed the Easics – ICsense partnership to address this need. At the same time, the agreement allows each partner to continue and strengthen its own expertise”.
“Partnering with Easics complements our offering of analog IC design”, said Bram De Muer, CEO of ICsense, “During five years of intense cooperation, we have aligned our business processes, project management and design methodologies. This partnership is the logical next step; it allows us to make a solid offering of production-ready mixed-signal ASIC solutions.”
Companies interested in this mixed-signal ASIC offering may contact either Easics or ICsense, which will call upon the other company as preferred partner. The combined teams of Easics and ICsense include 38 highly skilled engineers, and are housed in the Arenberg Science Park in Leuven, Belgium.
Since 2006, Easics and ICsense have cooperated to design a number of successful mixed-signal ASICs. These include a medical chip for Cochlear (Sydney, Australia and Mechelen, Belgium), a batteryless avionics RFID chip for Tego (Waltham, MA, USA), a high-accuracy sensing system for a leading industrial customer, and a power management ASIC for a telecom customer.
About ICsense
ICsense is an ISO 9001:2000 certified analog IC design house, specializing in high-performance analog, mixed-signal and high-voltage IC design for medical, automotive, consumer and industrial markets. Its strengths are power and battery management, sensor, actuator and MEMS interfacing with data acquisition and high-voltage designs. ICsense was founded in 2004 as a spin-off from the University of Leuven (Belgium) and is privately held.
About Easics
Easics is a System-on-Chip design company, targeting designs in both FPGA and digital & mixed-signal ASIC technology. Easics designs reliable and scalable high-performance and low-power embedded systems for leading product companies active in wireless & wired communication, medical, industrial, automotive, aerospace, multimedia and measurement equipment. Easics was founded in 1991 as a spin-off from imec and the University of Leuven (Belgium). Easics is privately owned since 2004.
