“What excites us about Agile Analog is the potential for scale,” said Omers partner Henry Gladwyn. “Every other analogue IP supplier is restricted to selling a limited range of standard IP products. Because Agile Analog’s technology enables it to create the IP that the customer wants, and integrate more functionality into a chip design, the company is not limited by the size of today’s analogue IP market.”
“This funding round marks the start of the next chapter: the technology and process are proven with a range of customers from OEMs to Tier 1 Semiconductor companies. So now it’s time to enable all semiconductor companies and the increasing number of OEMs who are designing their own silicon,” said Agile executive chairman Pete Hutton.
The company’s commercial and engineering support teams will be expanded, starting with enlarging the North American team and opening an office in Taiwan to provide sales and application engineering in Asia.
It has also begun recruiting development engineers for its Cambridge UK headquarters, and across Europe. Overall, the plan is to double headcount to over 100 people over the next year.
“Part of the funding will be used for technology development, to enhance process support, increase the range of analogue IP supported and expand the number of foundries supported,” said the company. “IP currently supported includes security, data conversion, power management, audio, signal processing and timing, and this functional coverage will be extended to satisfy increased customer demands.”
What does Agile offer?
Agile Analog claims to have developed process-agnostic and foundry-agnostic way to generate IP on demand, so asic and SoC manufacturers can commission it to produce analogue IP that matches a chosen process and node: “Agile Analog IP is already compatible with almost all analogue CMOS processes, including advanced finfet processes.”
At the moment it lists the following products:
- side-channel attack monitor core for security
- low drop-out regulator for analogue loads
- low drop-out regulator for digital loads
- ADC
- DAC
- temperature sensor
- glitch-free clock
- voltage and current reference
- programmable-threshold comparator
- charge-pump / body-bias generator
Taking the ADC as an example: it has a rail-to-rail differential or single-ended inputs and is configurable, with choices including up to 12bit resolution, up to 20Msample/s and up to eight input channels.
“Our methodology also allows us to quickly re-target our IP to different process options. The ‘agileADC GP’ analogue-to-digital converter is available on CMOS and FD-SOI processes from 0.18um down to 22nm. We support all the major foundries including TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung Foundry and SMIC as well as other IC foundries and manufacturers,” according to the company.