February 12, 2004 – A group of structured IC manufacturers and EDA companies have formed the Structured ASIC Association to educate the industry about the technology.

The four companies — Chip Express, Santa Clara, CA; Lightspeed Semiconductor, Santa Clara, CA; Synplicity Inc., Sunnyvale, CA; and Tera Systems Inc., Campbell, CA — work with structured ASICs, which use pre-diffused base metal layers to implement logic cells, memory, and I/O, with custom logic for specific applications implemented in the final few layers of metal. The technology promises to achieve development cost reductions of up to 75% from standard cell devices, and unit costs 90% cheaper than FPGAs.

A recent study by In-Stat/MDR predicted a 150% compound annual growth rate for structured ASICs between 2002 and 2007.