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Five must-know tips for designing a custom ASIC

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Sophie Claire
Five must-know tips for designing a custom ASIC

The only way to stand out in this highly competitive market is through the delivery of optimized, high-performing products. Where you're developing next-generation wearables, industrial automation systems, or smart home devices, the custom hardware can open your product to previously unseen levels of performance, efficiency, and savings. Among the most powerful tools for realizing this goal is the Custom ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit).

This blog digs deep into how a Custom ASIC can benefit your product, listing out its design process, cost factors, and considerations when deciding whether it's right for your business.


With the emergence of connected devices, 5G, AI, and IoT, Custom ASICs are on top. As products get complex, businesses shift towards customization instead of taking generic stuff. But what is it about Custom ASICs that makes them so tempting?

Performance Gains Tailored to Your Needs

A Custom ASIC is a chip created from the ground up to satisfy the unique requirements of your product. The term means you're not making use of general-purpose components that may have features you're not utilizing or simply inefficiencies. Instead, your ASIC has been designed to meet your product's exact functional and performance requirements. In other words, the example could be when one has a high-end smartphone, a custom ASIC is the only means of handling certain functionalities a lot quicker than a general-purpose chip, such as image processing or power management.

For instance, the success with A-series chips in iPhones is a great example of how such a custom approach can be taken to performance superiority. Not using off-the-shelf processors, but designing chips intended exclusively for device-based processes, it is quite evident that the power efficiency and performance will work out better than what an off-the-shelf processor may offer.

Power Efficiency and Miniaturization

One of the major concerns is power consumption, especially when talking about mobile devices, IoT sensors, and wearables. Now, with custom ASIC, you can lay down power efficiency right to the very last milliwatt. With integrations of custom power management features, you can extend the life of a battery, which becomes extremely critical for devices such as smartwatches and medical implants, where energy preservation is a matter of supreme importance.


Another significant advantage is miniaturization. Implement on a single custom chip various functions, which reduces the number of components of your product, hence saving space and allowing much smaller and sleeker designs. This is particularly important in healthcare, where device size directly impacts usability and comfort for patients.


Cost Savings with Scale

Developing a Custom ASIC - Although the one-time front-end investment is higher, the ROI is substantial for large orders. Why? After making the one-time investment in design and setup, producing an ASIC might be more economical than using several standard components. Indeed, an ASIC well-designed to combine the function of several off-the-shelf components into one chip saves on procurement and assembly costs.

For example, in consumer electronics, where millions of units are produced, savings can be very significant. In consumer electronics, companies like Samsung and Sony frequently create custom ASICs to get a competitive advantage while lowering long-term costs at the same time while optimizing performance.


Designing and manufacturing a Custom ASIC is a multi-step process, but every step counts to deliver an integrated circuit that meets exactly what you need. Here's a step-by-step ASIC design flow.

Step 1: Initial Specifications

The very first and most fundamental step in ASIC design is defining your requirements. This usually involves deep consultations where you discuss exactly what your product would need. Key questions include:

In this step, you align the capabilities of the chip with the objectives of your product. A clear and granular specification will prevent expensive design changes later in the development process.

Design Step 2: Architectural Design

Once specified, these requirements are mapped onto the higher levels of architecture that determine which features are to be included, balance the power consumption, and the silicon real estate to be used. Here, the design will make use of pre-verified intellectual property blocks for memory, processing, or connectivity and custom logic designed uniquely for your application.

Step 3: Logic Design and Simulation

After finalizing the architecture, the detailed logic design begins. Here, the engineers use tailored software that produces a circuit-level design of the chip based on the architecture. Design is checked to ensure it realizes the functionality it is intended to accomplish. Once more, simulation tools are executed to validate the design for every possible operating environment. This may kill bugs even before the chip undergoes the physical design phase.

For example, a company developing a customized ASIC for a hub of a smart house can simulate the performance of a chip that takes multiple inputs from sensors, thereby ensuring the efficient processing of data while drawing low power.

Step 4: Physical Design and Fabrication

Once the logic design is verified, it needs to be transformed into a physical layout that could be fabricated. This is achieved by creating the layout of every layer of the chip and preparing it for manufacturing in a semiconductor foundry. The process of making, or fabrication, is how the chip is produced on a silicon wafer; this is a highly sensitive and detailed process that has to be completed correctly so that the final product functions.

Step 5: Testing and Validation

Following fabrication, the ASIC undergoes several testing and validation cycles. This is an important step because one would determine if indeed the manufactured chip performs as expected. Engineers will test it against the requirements in the original specification, and any issues found are corrected. In this stage, yield- that is the percentage of chips that work correctly -is evaluated to ensure cost efficiency.

Step 6: Mass Production

Once the chip has been thoroughly tested, then it is ready for mass production. The number of units could be from thousands to millions depending on the level of complexity of the ASIC. Every batch undergoes testing to make sure that these units meet quality standards before they get into the final product.


To talk about technical steps in detail, read more about the ASIC design flow.


Making a Custom ASIC is not always the proper solution for every project; however, in specific situations, it can result in revolutionary changes. Consultation on ASIC design may help you ascertain whether this method should be used for your specific needs. Consider the following points:

Volume Production

High volumes increasingly create significant cost benefits of using ASICs, especially where multiple functions in one chip are brought, minimizing the BOM (Bill Of Materials) components. This is an advantage in consumer electronics and automotive as well as in IoT applications, where only the development cost of ASICs can be offset against volume production.

Example: Companies usually call for ASICs for automotive electronics to elevate safety, reliability, and efficiency. A consultation may help automobile manufacturers determine whether a custom chip can streamline the system; consequently, producing more improvements in the efficiencies involved in the process.

Specific Product Needs

If your product has unique functional or performance needs, a custom ASIC is the only way to create desired outcomes. Off-the-shelf components may be limited in functionality and will have added complexity via workarounds or additional components, which adds cost. ASIC design consultation can help identify if a custom chip would provide you with the flexibility and control needed to fulfil such requirements.

A medical device design company may, for instance, require custom signal processing for biometric data whereby off-the-shelf microcontrollers might not handle it very efficiently. This could be integrated along with the support of power optimization as well as smaller size by a custom ASIC; this would be pivotal in wearability on the patient.

Power, Size, and Security Constraints

Power efficiency, size constraints, and security requirements often are the key drivers for custom ASICs. If your product needs to work under low-power conditions, fit in a tight form factor, or be subjected to high degrees of built-in security, a custom ASIC allows you to optimize all of these factors from the ground up.


In most cases, with an off-the-shelf chip, you have to settle for someone else's compromise between various use cases in a design. A Custom ASIC is, by definition, optimized to the performance needs of your application. This can lead to higher speed, processing power, and responsiveness where it matters.

For instance, 5G telecommunications equipment may take advantage of custom ASICs to outsource network-specific tasks over-generalized computation such that low latency and high throughput are maintained.

For the requirement of power consumption in the case of a product, especially which is battery driven, such as a smartphone, IoT sensors and wearables low power optimization plays a very crucial role. Using a Custom ASIC, one can actually design a chip that consumes the least amount of energy possible required for the task so as to extend the battery life and improve overall product efficiency.


One of the key benefits of designing a custom ASIC is to reduce external components, which simplifies the BOM. With several functions now implemented on one chip, you remove requirements for additional processors, memory modules or even discrete components that tend to consume less material and therefore manufacturing cost.


Custom ASICs can place speciality security features directly into the silicon. This is especially important for industries that require healthcare and finance, where sensitive information needs to be protected against external threat penetration. That's where a custom ASIC comes in: with its tamper-resistant technology and encryption directly placed into the chip.


A custom ASIC is suitable for your business for several reasons - performance, volume of production, and long-term cost.

Here's what to look at:

Success for your custom ASIC project lies in finding the right design partner. Nano Genius Technologies stands as a company specialized to meet all your needs by delivering quality, low-power, full-custom ASIC solutions for your specific product requirements. From consultation on ASIC design to full-scale production, we cover everything needed to deliver optimum performance while cutting costs and ensuring that your product stays aligned with the demands of the market.

If you like this blog post and wish to read more on cutting-edge technology and innovation, check out Nano Genius Technologies for more blogs.


Frequently Asked Questions


The cost of developing a Custom ASIC can be highly variable and sensitive to the complexity of the design as well as the volume of production. While initial design costs can be anywhere from $100,000 to millions, in high-volume production, it can be much more cost-effective per unit.

Custom ASIC: typically will take 6 months to 2 years to design and manufacture; it all depends on the complexity of the circuit and the number of iterations that will get the specifications exactly right.

No, once a Custom ASIC is manufactured, it cannot be reprogrammed. However, if one requires flexibility, that is available with an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) during the prototyping phase, and after this, he can move on to an ASIC.

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Sophie Claire
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