What are some of the benefits of going ASIC?
Every year, increasingly more and more circuit functions and features are added to all kinds of electronic systems. This includes analog applications where precision, resolution and temperature stability, ultra low-power (nanopower) are paramount considerations in specifying the circuit functions and features. One of the latest trends in semiconductors is putting a complete high precision analog signal conditioning sub-system into one solid-state ASIC chip. This implies not only very high accuracy linear components, but also a mechanism whereby all system level specifications can be trimmed, or calibrated. Therefore not only the electronic components themselves are high precision, very stable with temperature and time, etc., but increasingly they also have to provide the means to add compensation factors to correct for other system inaccuracies, such as sensor offset and gain settings.
