Intel acquires company for low-cost asics

Intel has acquired eASIC, an American manufacturer of so-called structured asics. Intel wants to use the company’s technology to combine its own fpgas with the asics on a single die.

The Santa Clara eASIC company will become part of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group and the acquisition should be completed in the third quarter. According to Intel, the structured asics occupy a place between FPGAs and regular asics. They could be developed and deployed quickly and cheaply, just like FPGAs, but with the power and speed advantages of asics.

Intel has already had FPGAs in its range since the acquisition of Altera in 2015. FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are configurable chips that are flexible and that companies can deploy quickly. Technology companies are increasingly using FPGAs, including for applications with a lot of I/O. Asics, or application specific integrated circuit, are focused on a single task and therefore less flexible, but because they are optimized for certain computational tasks, they can be more economical and faster.

Intel hopes to be able to offer customers who initially opt for FPGAs a follow-up offering so that they can use structured asics at a later stage. The company also wants to use its embedded multi-die interconnect bridge, or emib, to connect FPGAs and asics on a single die.