Consumer ASIC Design

System to ASIC has produced millions of ASICs for our customers addressing the consumer market. The consumer market is diverse, it includes applications ranging from cosmetics to fitness, from mobile devices to secure banking, toys, appliances, and many more. Our ASIC design services focus on delivering ASIC solutions that realize our customer’s objectives and facilitate ultimate market success. We invest our time to understand the unique requirements of each application and become a design partner empowered to help drive a successful project.

System To ASIC delivers multi-generational ASIC solutions to established consumer product power houses. We develop ASIC solutions for small start-ups as well, and have been privileged to contribute to their transformation into dynamic market leaders. A few of our ASIC projects addressing the consumer market are summarized below:

Cosmetic Brush ASIC

A motor driven cosmetic brush is an important tool in daily skin care regiment for millions of consumers. The brush action is designed to gently wiggle brush tips back and forth against the skin surface without possible damage from aggressive scrubbing, abrasion, or stretching of sub-dermal collagen. Driving this seemingly simple battery operated appliance requires an involved control system to manage resonant motor drive, non-contact battery charging and protection, operator control, and brush type detection.

The Cosmetic Bush ASIC design integrates all resources required to tune, operate, charge as well as monitor and report charge level of the cosmetic brush. Additionally, the ASIC chip has built-in resources to test and tune the brush motor system before each use to achieve optimum resonant operating frequency and motor travel

CB ASIC Development – Results:

  • Cost reduction – eliminated 19 components including microcontroller, voltage reference and regulated voltage doubler
  • ROI < 5 months
  • Development cycle – 18 weeks

CB ASIC’s Functional Features:

  • Tuned half-bridge resonant motor drive with damped ring response detection
  • Battery Charge/Discharge management and Over-charge/discharge protection
  • Charge level indicator with built-in voltage doubler for multi-color, multi-element LED drive
  • Built-in pre-run resonance detect for operating mode/brush type detection
  • Piezo speaker tone driver
  • EEPROM configured calibration, operating mode and manufacturing parameters
  • Fully integrated inductive and optical serial communication controller

CB ASIC’s Notable Performance Features:

  • Extended operating voltage range:0.8 – 5.5VDC
  • < 100nA bandgap voltage reference
  • < 50nA temperature compensated oscillator
  • Controller
  • EEPROM

Interactive Whiteboard ASIC

BoyInteractiveWhiteboard

Interactive electronic whiteboards are used in the academic as well as corporate settings to enhance learning, teaching and the presentation environment by allowing material written on the whiteboard to be digitized, stored and interactively edited by multiple users.

The IEW ASIC chip is responsible for precisely establish XY location of multiple active pens (multiple users) on the interactive white board, while rejecting various noise sources that could produce erroneous readings. The IEW ASIC design amplifies filters, rectifies and integrates incoming analog signal from each embedded whiteboard gridline, synchronizes conditioned outputs between the channels, performs low noise analog to digital conversion, and then translates resulting digital stream into user data.

 IW ASIC Development – Results:

  • Cost reduction – 6 connectors and 3 stacked PCBs, 203 components, including precision opamps, comparators, ADCs, DACs, EPLD, microcontroller, digitally programmable resistors, voltage regulators.
  • ROI <  2 month
  • Development cycle 20 weeks

IW ASIC’s Functional Features:

  • Precision, noise immune multi-pen position identification and tracking
  • Individually programmable X and Y grid drivers
  • Programmable signal processing algorithms

IW ASIC’s Performance Features:

  • Multiple supply voltages – 1.8, 5.0 and 35V
  • Four (4) differential analog channels with programmable attenuation/gain 1 to 1,000 V/V
  • Four (4) active bandpass filter stages with programmable bandwidth 10 to 100Khz
  • Low offset active rectifier
  • Four channel, SAR ADC – 12 bits
  • DAC 12 bits
  • EEPROM
  • Controller

Secure Credit Card Reader ASIC

CreditCardReader.

The Secure Credit Card Reader ASIC is used in credit card readers and provides a highly specialized magnetic head reading processor with technology for precise comparison of data bit placement relative to one another.  The technology is used at a point of sale to process credit card payment and verify that card is valid and not a counterfeit copy. Specialized processing of magnetic head signal for precise relative position produces a pattern used to verify authenticity.

The SCCR ASIC design integrates three low power channels to signal condition and process widely varying analog signal coming from each magnetic head.  Additionally, automatic gain control combined with fast saturation recovery and dynamic peak detection with very low jitter threshold enables credit card reader to accommodate wide variations in signal output levels due speed of credit card swipe, encoded level, wear level on card, and alignment of the reader head to magnetic stripe.

SCCR ASIC Development – Results:

  • Cost reduction – eliminated second PCB, 2 connectors and 55 components including low current, low offset, low noise opamps, comparators and a voltage reference
  • ROI <  6 month
  • Development cycle 16 weeks

SCCR ASIC Functional Features:

  • High noise immunity, simultenious processing of three  signature signals from magnetic heads of the reader
  • Enhanced fraud protection with specialized pattern processing.

SCCR ASIC ASIC Performance Features:

  • Voltage Range: 0.9 – 5.5VDC
  • < 5µS recovery time differential high gain amplifier for sampled analog signal processing.
  • Three (3) matched high gain differential analog channels
  • Very low offset, fully integrated (no external capacitor) peak detect and hold circuit
  • < 200nA bandgap voltage reference