How Mature-Technology ASICs Can Give You the Edge

Learn how application-specific integrated circuits can enable companies to leverage their key IP and distinguish themselves from competitors who use off-the-shelf ICs.

By Ian Lankshear, EnSilica
All About Circuits | July 17, 2025

Off-the-shelf integrated circuits (ICs) offer many benefits to electronics systems designers. The clearest of these is convenience. Vendors have made it easy to prototype solutions and get to market by providing evaluation boards and other support. But that convenience comes at a cost: it makes it harder to differentiate on metrics important to the customer, such as power efficiency, functionality, and size.

Evaluation boards based on off-the-shelf ICs offer a potentially rapid path to production. However, the solutions based on those ready-made products will inevitably possess convergent feature sets. The systems designer has limited opportunity to optimize for specific sensors and displays, for the computational demands of the application, or for the power conversion strategy that works best for the target use case.

These limitations are becoming more apparent. Users now want to take advantage of technologies such as machine learning, and to deploy systems that draw so little power that they need only a single battery charge over their useful lifetimes. Generic ICs mean that these users must deal with fixed performance envelopes and modes of operation, along with electrical characteristics that can only be changed marginally using firmware modifications or external mixed-signal circuitry. This external circuitry also adds to the overall cost of the production hardware.

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