Chip Design: Why switch from FPGA to ASIC

When it comes to implementation of an integrated circuit, there are some factors

that should be taken into account before choosing a design method, such as:

• Time-to-market – how much time do the designers have for

development?
• Complexity of the design – amount of gates and flexible functionality
• Frequency of the circuit – analog or digital (or mixed), high or low?
• Ease of implementing changes in the design – is the circuit
reprogrammable? updatable? multi-usable? is the design separatable to
teams?
• Anticipated market size – is the circuit intended to be prototypical?
for limited or mass production? frequent reconfigurated?
• And of course, cost considerations – are there Non Recurring
Engineering costs? what is the raw price of each unit?

While FPGA strategy’s advantages are related to the re-programmability and the fast
production of the design, it lacks most of the other factors. In the following cases
FPGA design is not effective:

• High frequency clock or low power circuit is required – FPGA has

some severe limitations in manners of power and timing. The custom nature
of ASIC design is supposed to significantly improve the performance of the
circuit as it saves power and enables setting higher raw internal clock speeds.

• Complex design and mixed signal – The complexity of an FPGA is

limited since its logic possibilities are pre-defined. When a higher level of
logic is needed, FPGA becomes useless, while ASIC is more flexible and
enables to customize the capability of the circuit. ASIC has also the ability to
integrate pre-designed and verified components such as analog ones which
simplify the work with mixed signal circuits.
• Mass Production and very high volume designs – As a
programmable gate-array, FPGA has a readymade netlist with a pre-defined
capacity. While sometimes it may be found that a lot of resources are left
unused, the size of a unit circuit, and essentially its cost, found to be
unnecessarily high. The exact designing of ASIC makes it smaller with
maximum use of area, and critically cheaper.
• Protection and copy-securing of Intellectual Property – as FPGA
combines programmability of processors, the “software” of the chip may be
leaked. Since FPGA design’s “language” is uniform, material is in risk to
reach wrong eyes.

In brief – ASIC is better than FPGA in such cases because:

• Significantly reduces costs per unit

• Significantly saving power
• More secured and protected
• Smaller form factor
• Works in higher speeds