2 February 2021

ASIC advantages and disadvantages

ASIC can offer greater performance, lower power, higher voltage, and also reduce the footprint of materials and increased reliability. Also, ASIC offers higher security, as an ASIC is far harder to reverse engineer than a microcontroller or FPGA design, where the IP stored in easy to read memory. So here this article gives the main key advantages and disadvantages of ASIC to better understand this topic.

Advantages of ASIC:

  • For every high volume, design cost comes out very less. Larger volumes of ASIC design implementation proves to be cheaper than implementing design using FPGA.
  • ASIC is faster than FPGA. This gives an enormous opportunity for speed optimizations.
  • In ASIC you can implement analogue circuits, mixed-signal designs. This is generally not possible in FPGA.
  • ASIC gives design flexibility.
  • ASIC can be optimized for required low power, Low power ASIC helps battery lives a longer life.
  • In ASIC DET is inserted. In FGPGA DET is not carried out.

Disadvantages of ASIC:

  • Some large ASICs can take a year or more to time to design. A good way to shorten development time is to make prototypes using FPGA and then switch to an ASIC.
  • ASIC design tools are very much expensive and costly, you spend a huge amount of NRE.
  • In ASIC you should take care of some of the DFM issues, this signal integrity issues, and many more. In FPGA you don't have a;; these because the ASIC designer takes care of all these.