Intel has announced its plans to expand its programmable solutions portfolio to include structured application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) by acquiring US-based provider eASIC. The company’s team will join Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group.
Intel says the acquisition will help it meet customers’ diverse needs of time-to-market, features, performance, cost, power and product life cycles.
The company said, “Having a structured ASICs offering will help us better address high-performance and power-constrained applications that we see many of our customers challenged within market segments like 4G and 5G wireless, networking and IoT. We can also provide a low-cost, automated conversion process from FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), including competing FPGAs, to structured ASICs”.
Intel’s long-term plans include the development of a new class of programmable chip that takes advantage of its Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge technology to combine Intel FPGAs with structured ASICs in a system-in-package solution.
The company expects to complete the acquisition in the third quarter of 2018, after customary closing conditions are met.
