According to the European company specializing in semiconductor design and services, it is now possible to bring an ASIC to market for less than $5 million dollars in upfront investment – and customers lacking semiconductor expertise can lower the risks by outsourcing to Presto the entire ASIC procurement process, from design to delivery
It’s a two-speed world: on the one hand, applications such as smartphones or artificial intelligence accelerators keep pushing the semiconductor industry towards Angstrom-scale process nodes and hundreds of billions transistor counts; on the other hand, many end products in a variety of markets – from industrial to medical and more – are still relying on an electronic box containing a PCB with a number of low-integration ICs and discrete components. Replacing the old-style box with an ASIC would clearly provide multiple benefits to the end product, but manufacturers lacking a semiconductor expertise are concerned by the risks of a complex production process. Targeting this largely untapped market, a France-headquartered company called Presto Engineering is addressing European and American manufacturers with a two-pronged message: ASICs are now cheaper and easier to make than ever before, and risks can be reduced by outsourcing the entire ASIC procurement process – from design to delivery – to Presto. Michel Villemain, CEO of Presto Engineering, described his company’s offering in the video interview he recently gave to EDACafe’s Sanjay Gangal; in this article we will add a few details, as well as the answers he provided to some additional questions.
