FPGA based product to ASIC design

[cxdao]

Hi All,

Our company (A Chinese company) has a product for electric energy measurement which is based on FPGA. It's from xilinx. The design is not big; it is about 10,000 lines of VHDL code. But we don't have IC design experience. I learned cadence encounter in the college lab with some really fundamental designs... But none of us in the company have IC tape out experience. I guess it would be risky to make IC design by ourselves. So, we would like to find an IC design company which could help us to mitigate our design from FPGA to IC. I have searched threads here and someone mentioned "ON Semiconductor" (https://www.onsemi.com). Are there any recommendations? I would also like to what's the general price it could be and how long it normally takes from RTL to tape out? And of course all other suggestions are welcome.

I'm sorry if I post this in the wrong place. Thanks all!

 

[artmalik]

Well you are asking a lot here. First ASIC is going to very expensive to make as you will need too many tools/people to do this. from a business point of view ASICs are made by companies who want to improve on the performance which they dont get in FPGAs. So if you have 10000 lines I dont thing you will be able to offset of the cost. you have to look at what you need to do to justify the cost.

 

[cxdao]

Hi artmalik,

Thanks a lot for you reply. This is my first post... I also searched relevant threads here, but didn't find most matched thread....

Actually the purpose of this mitigation is to reduce the cost. I'm not sure if this is correct, because it's more like a business decision and I'm not able to change it. I was told that this kind of product will have a large market in the near future, so by amortizing the NRE cost to each product, the IC chip will give us more benefit than FPGA.

 

[artmalik]

Ok I got it. Lets look at a general scenario... I come up a good system level algorithm to implement say a traffic light controller. This is a very inexpensive product which I can easily use through an FPGA and get done with it. ASIC companies are big like TI, Samsung, Nvidia etc while going even on a more expensive side is the Intel, AMD(server chips) etc which are a lot more expensive so you can see their profit margin per chip where intel gets the maximum(though it is going down), ASIC companies a little less while FPGA based are the least.

For ASIC : You will need EDA tools : Design Compiler, Primetime , Floorplan tools, etc ( there will be cheaper versions from Cadence)
You will need vendor libraries which you can get from the foundry or from companies like ARM [ though there are not many).

You can also contract a design services company which have the above resources, you can work with them to get your chip on wafer alongside their own chips basically piggy back on them. I think the best way is to contact the fabrication company where you are planning to get the chip manufactured, they will be able to guide you as to who can help you with these design services.