High-Voltage Structured ASICs for Industrial Applications - A Single Chip Solution

2 This paper presents a novel, low-cost single chip solution optimized for the integration of industrial electronic systems with low to medium production volumes, where both analog/mixed-signal and smart power capabilities are required , by using the novel high-voltage structured ASIC, a hybrid integration of low-voltage structured ASIC and smart power functionalities. In this paper, detailed construction of the high-voltage structured ASIC platform is illustrated. System development approaches basing on the platform are described and benefits of using this platform are analyzed. I. INTRODUCTION Integration and miniaturization of electronic systems play the key roles in performance improvement, energy saving and cost reduction. Over the past decades device dimensions and supply voltages of CMOS technologies are steadily scaled down to enable increasingly large scale of system integration. Greatly benefiting from using submicron devices geometries todays highly complex electronic systems with millions of devices can be integrated on a single chip. Most electronic systems can be cost-efficiently integrated by one of the three primary integration approaches: the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) approach, the field programmable gate array (FPGA) approach or the intermediate approach of structured ASIC. ASICs provide the largest scale of integration and highest performance. But due to the high research, designing and testing costs ASICs are merely economical for high volume products, where the high non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs can be compensated by reduced unit variable costs. Offering high flexibility , low NRE costs and short design time, FPGAs provide a good solution for low volume products and prototyping. However realizable functionalities and reachable performance by FPGA are strongly limited due to its digital nature. Structured ASIC is an intermediate technology between ASIC and FPGA, offering high performance of ASICs and low NRE costs of FPGAs, allows products to be introduced quickly to market at lower cost and with less design effort. However, many systems for industrial applications, for instance the industrial automation control systems, cannot be cost efficiently integrated by one of the three aforementioned approaches due to their relatively small production volumes, huge varieties of functionalities and large differences in operating voltages of in-system components. A typical industrial automation control system is exposed in Fig.1, where sensor signals have to be conditioned by high performance analog circuits, the digitized signals are processed by data processing component and finally the low-voltage output signals must be transferred and amplified by mixed-voltage interface circuits into high-voltage high-current outputs for the …