Intel has announced that it is acquiring eASIC, a leading ASICs provider based in Santa Clara, California. According to Intel, this purchase will expand its programmable solutions portfolio to include structured ASICs and expand its talent pool. With the purchase, Intel secures a firm with a 19-year “success record” that has made leading products thanks to its “world-class” team. Intel plans to finish the deal by the third quarter of 2018 after customary closing conditions have been met.
In its announcement, Intel said:
“This combination brings together the best-in-class technologies from both companies to provide customers with more choice, faster time-to-market and lower development costs. Specifically, having a structured ASICs offering will help us better address high-performance and power-constrained applications that we see many of our customers challenged with in market segments like 4G and 5G wireless, networking and IoT.”
In the near-term, Intel will be able to provide a low-cost automated conversion process from FPGAs to structured ASICs. In the longer term, Intel wants to build "a new class of programmable chips" which leverage Intel's Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology to combine Intel FPGAs and ASICs in a system as a package.
While Intel said it expects the deal to close in Q3 2018, it didn’t give a timeframe for the first products which will take advantage of this deal so we’ll have to wait for those announcements.
