Agile Analog and Silex Insight Establish Strategic Partnership to Provide Combined Solutions

The new agreement between Agile Analog, a provider of configurable analog IP, and Silex Insight, a leading supplier of digital IP cores, opens up new avenues and ways to source IP solutions optimized for customers’ applications, foundries and nodes.

Cambridge, UK, September 7, 2021 - Agile Analog, a supplier of highly configurable cross-platform, cross-node process analog IP building blocks, has reached a cooperation agreement with Belgium-based Silex Insight, under which the two companies will jointly release and market a combination of analog and digital IP solutions that can provide customers with enhanced security solutions for ASIC and SoC chip development.

Agile Analog has developed a technology, the COMPOSA system, that generates configurable analog IP optimized to customer specifications for any foundry and node in a matter of weeks. In addition to data conversion, power management, and sensing, it also provides security and protection against side-channel attacks (SCA) and tampering through a range of configurable sensors that detect temperature shocks, supply voltage variations/glitches, and clock manipulation. On the other hand, Silex Insight offers scalable and flexible digital security IP cores (i.e. Root of Trust/eSecure) that include security features such as secure boot, system integrity by ensuring authenticated software execution, device authentication, cryptographic acceleration, and generation and storage of secure keys and secret information. This combined solution between Agile Analog and Silex Insight can be tuned for each specific solution, providing a high level of security and protection.

The collaboration between the two companies means providing customers building ASIC or SoC chips with analog and digital solutions that will enable chip developers and chip manufacturers to speed up the development process while achieving better design outcomes:

• By sourcing analog and digital IP solutions for complete functional blocks, manufacturers can spend less time on interface issues between analog and digital blocks and use less chip area.

• This partnership provides chipmakers with a single vendor interface, reducing the number of suppliers and effectively solving some IP implementation issues

“Resource and time constraints mean chipmakers need to continually look for new ways to reduce development bottlenecks and focus internal resources on the most critical elements of a design,” said John Hartley, Chief Commercial Officer at Agile Analog. “By sourcing the joint solution provided by Agile Analog and Silex Insights, leading chipmakers can provide full functional areas to proven domain experts, allowing their developers to focus on their own core areas of competence.”

“The collaboration between Agile Analog and Silex Insight will bring a high level of security to SoCs at any process node,” said Michel Van Maercke, CEO of Silex Insight. “Like Agile Analog, our mission is to provide customers with IP that is fully compliant to their specifications and ensures excellent quality for a relatively painless tapeout process.”

Agile Analog and Silex Insight have already delivered the combined solution to multiple customers with more in the pipeline, and both Agile Analog and Silex Insight generate custom IP optimized for the customer’s application, foundry and node, so the jointly developed mixed-signal system will provide chipmakers with ideal results in terms of power, speed, area or any other selected parameter.