Platform for low-power ASIC designs for power-sensitive applications

Orca Systems has released a highly integrated ASIC platform that greatly improves system performance and decreases power consumption for power-sensitive space, terrestrial, industrial and edge computing applications. Its new ORC5000 ASIC platform has been applied to develop the company's first ASIC product, the ORC5990, developed for use in LEO IoT satellite payload and terrestrial IoT gateway designs. The company's custom ASIC design, modem expertise, and integration capacities deliver 10x performance enhancements over traditional FPGA-based system design with just a fraction of the power consumption.

The company's technology assets in the RF, analog, DSP and power management domains operate as building blocks and key elements of the ORC5000 ASIC platform. Its innovative systems architecture and semiconductor design expertise have allowed the company to create custom ASIC and RF SoC solutions that fulfil customer performance/power/area needs. This high level of specialisation, spanning initial system architecture to final production, makes the platform the choice compared to traditional implementations utilising FPGA and other discrete components. Its ASICs are particularly energy efficient by design, making them an optimal solution to satisfy the stringent energy budgets of power-sensitive applications.

"Conventional implementations using discrete components or FPGAs are not optimised to meet the application-specific needs of today's low-power system designs, resulting in higher power consumption and costly overhead and features," said John McDonough, CEO of Orca Systems. "Orca Systems has the custom ASIC and RF SoC design expertise to address our customers' performance, power and board area requirements and deliver solutions that significantly reduce total cost of ownership. Our design capabilities also include development and integration of complex RF, analog and digital IP from our partners and customers."

The ASIC platform based on the GF 22FDX platform has considerable advantages for LEO satellite payloads due to its low power consumption and susceptibility to latch-up and single-event effects. The new platform also employs GF's eMRAM technology in the application CPU subsystem, which allows low power and decreased soft-error rate and enhances reliability for satellite communications.