We're about to move an existing design to an ASIC. The prototype was built using a small PIC and some discretes, so the ASIC will look nothing like the prototype.
I'm looking for some suggestions for ASIC design house people have used and been happy with as well as ASIC design services (someone able to take a project successfully from concept through production), should we decide to use outside services.
There are too many issues to detail here, but here are a few:
- Super-low power, we're looking for aggressive sleep mode, low power while running, some kind of built-in RC oscillator if that's possible (4MHz and 32KHz and off).
- Low voltage would be ideal 1.5 - 1.8 volts or thereabouts.
- Need some beefy I/O lines if possible 15-25ma
- The application itself is reasonably straight-forward, we need a UART, a state machine, some switch debouncing, jelly-bean stuff like that, as well as some kind of ROM space a few K and some RAM a hundred bytes or so.
The more I think about the problem, the more it seems like a custom micro-controller. Any thoughts?
Thanks, Dave.