Agile Analog: Analog IP the way you want it.

Until now, buyers of analog IP have had to settle for the least bad option from a limited portfolio of standard IP products.
Agile Analog is the company behind a new approach: to give the designers of ASICs and SoCs the analog IP that they really want. And to enable this new approach, they developed the very unique COMPOSA™ methodology for the generation of customer-specified IP fresh for every new chip design from any foundry on any node.
With a mission to transform the landscape of the Analog IP market space, Agile Analog has expanded the portfolio for standard IP products. Pete Hutton, the Executive Chairman of the company, implies his expertise to aid and advice to ensure that ideas flourish.
We at Insights Success caught up with Pete Hutton in our endeavor to find “The 10 Most Disruptive Companies in Semiconductor Industry.” We talked with Pete to understand how Agile Analog is changing the landscape of Analog IP.
Below are the highlights of the interview.
Give us a brief overview of your company, its mission, and the key aspects of its strong foothold in the Semiconductor industry.
Agile Analog brings freedom of choice to IC designers in their use of analog circuits (analog IP). For too long, designers have been restricted in terms of timescales, process choice, or functionality of the analog circuits they want to use. In many cases, the analog tail wags the SoC dog.
Agile Analog provides exactly the analog IP that customers want by changing the existing manual design paradigm into a fully automated end-to-end flow.
Describe your top-notch offerings that address the need of your customers.
We have internal automation technology which captures analog IP designs and then enables those designs to be quickly and reliability generated on new silicon processes so that it precisely matches the customer’s requirements.
What makes your company a preferred choice among your clientele over other competitors?
We’re the only supplier who gives customers the analog IP that they want on the process they want. Our approach is completely silicon process independent and can generate the same design on 180nm or FinFET, and will tailor the design for the process.
No other vendor can do this without undertaking a long, expensive, and potentially bug-ridden manual process.
How is your company implying the latest innovative technologies to streamline your work process?
We have created our own design flow by interfacing to and driving leading-edge EDA tools from Cadence, Mentor, and Synopsys. All our design and data is cloud-hosted, and our engineers can access their designs and tools anywhere in the world.
Communications internally and with customers use all the latest technologies.
Describe the values that drive your organization.
Partner and Quality-focused to make sure that we always do the best for the people we’re supplying, and we go above and beyond to make them successful with their designs.
An open, transparent, and collaborative Engineering organization with people at all levels of the company empowered to make the right decisions.
In your opinion, what could be the future of the Semiconductor market post the COVID-19 pandemic? And how are you strategizing your company’s operations for that future?
Covid has made two massive changes to the technology world. The first is that we’ve seen 15 years of technological change accelerated over the last 18 months. The second is that remote working and video calls have become commonplace.
We’ve already seen the technical change ripple through into semiconductor demand, and that will continue, as will the dynamic that pushes most technology companies to design their own silicon. Since all ICs use analog IP, then that’s just a tailwind acceleration of what we’re already doing.
Remote working means that people need security more than ever since they have distributed working environments, and we’re all now mixing home and office working, and so our focus on that area is beneficial.
In what ways have you or your company contributed to the community?
We support startups through partnerships with people like Silicon Catalyst and direct training and guidance for companies doing their first silicon. We’re engaging with industry activities around security to drive standardization and secure our customer’s products.
What are your future aspirations? Where do you see your company in the next five years?
In the next five years, we will have our technology, both analog IP and perhaps also methodology, out in most of the new ICs being designed.