User:INGENIUS55/ICsense

ICsense is

ICsense

Company type	Private
Industry	Semiconductors
Founded	2004
Founder	B. De Muer, W. Claes, Y. Geerts, T. Piessens
Headquarters	Belgium, Leuven , Belgium
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Analog, Mixed-signal, High Voltage IC solutions and ASIC design
Services	ISO 9001:2001 certified
Number of employees	+28
Website	ICsense.com

Company

In February 2004, ICsense has been founded by 4 PhDs in micro-electronics, as spin-off of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven(Belgium). As such, ICsense is backed-up by more than 30 years of experience and research in analog and mixed-signal IC design. ICsense is a privately held company.

ICsense is privately owned and backed by venture capitalists: Team of entrepreneurs and business angels (Belgium), Gemma Frisius Fund (UK), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the founders and Allegro Investment Fund(Belgium).

Technology

ICsense is an ISO 9001:2000 certified IC design house with core business in analog, mixed-signal and high-voltage IC design services, from custom IP to turnkey ASIC designs. The expertise is focused on energy-efficient interfacing solutions for sensors, actuators and MEMS with data acquisition, RFID and high-voltage drivers complemented with state-of-the-art power management and energy harvesting.

High voltage technologies such as I3T80 or I2T100 enable the use of potentials up to 100V on chip whereas a standard 0.35 CMOS process only bears a few volts.

Products and Activities

IC design houses typically focus on either an IP based business model or a custom design model. In the first model, existing analog blocks are sold as such without customization. The result is a cheaper but untailored analog circuit that is sold to the customer. It enables quick time to market for the customers. However, when customers demand lowest area, power and stringent specs, it is not possible to work with standard IP blocks. In that case a custom design house delivers a tailored circuit. Often more expensive but on all parameters outperforming a standard IP block. ICsense is a custom IC design house.

The company supplies Application Specific IC (ASIC's) for industrial, medical, automotive and consumer product applications (OEM markets). Design services for IDM companies include specific analog subblocks such as:

ICsense’ core expertise include:

• Analog: Bandgap references, CDS S/H and amps, (Fractional-N) PLLs, LDOs, Oscillators (Crystal free or not), OTAs: offset compensation, Reference buffers, Sensor interfaces: low-power Switched Cap circuits, Temperature sensors

• AD-DA conversion: high-accuracy, high-yield ΔΣ AD converters, Pipeline AD converters, SAR AD converters

• High-Voltage, High-Power: Class AB amplifiers, Class D amplifiers, Charge pump and multipliers, DC-DC converters, Drivers, I/O buffers, LDO regulators, SOPA, Switches

• Digital: FPGA, VHDL Modeling, Verilog-A, VHDL-AMS, C, Matlab

IC design features

• Extended temperature range: -50 º C – 200 º C
• Extended voltage supply range: 0.8V – +80V
• Technologies: 40nm – 0.8µm CMOS, BJT, DMOS (HV)‏
• ESD, EMC, long-term reliability
• Foundry independent

References

• CMOS Fractional N-synthesizers Expertise and book of CEO Bram De Muer

• ESAT-MICAS Laboratories Spin off from ESAT-MICAS (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

• Allegro Investmunt Fund Allegro Investmunt Fund

• [1] IEEE – The practice of analog design

External links

• ICsense official website
• IEEE 802.15.4