Industry 4.0 | inomizeIL

Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0, Industrial IoT (IIoT) is a reality in factory automation and control systems. Inomize’s engineering expertise and innovation in sensor interface ASICs for the connected world help engineers design intelligent and efficient factory automation and control systems that increase productivity, extend system life and save energy.

ASIC development can reduce BOM cost by as much as 80% but has historically been reserved for companies who had the high-volume production required to justify the up-front NRE costs. This has now changed. The benefits of the ASIC form factor, reliability, environmental robustness, IP protection, functional safety and security of supply now provide the compelling business case required for many applications in the industrial and healthcare markets.

Inomize is your trusted partner focused on custom ASIC design for industrial and healthcare OEMs looking to deliver reliable, leading-edge solutions across a wide range of applications.

Typical Industrial ASIC Applications

Pressure and flow sensors
Gas sensors
Chemical sensors
Movement and occupancy sensors
Motor and Solenoid controllers
Vibration and motion sensors
Tags and RFIDs
Inductive speed and position sensors
Precision timers
GaN, Laser and LED drivers
Ultrasonic sensor drivers

Industrial ASICs can address the challenges that are often difficult to solve with standard parts.

ESD protection for harsh environment
Wide supply voltage and temperature range
Reverse polarity protection
Overvoltage protection and detection
Short and open circuit protection and detection
Over temperature shut down
Error code correction (ECC) on memories and comms links
Spread spectrum clock and slew rate control to reduce EMI

Design and Supply of Industrial ASIC

Connectivity

The way factories operate is changing rapidly. The Industrial Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 or the “Smart Factory”, they all mean a more efficient, agile and connected workplace. Every aspect of manufacturing from the top floor to the shop floor will be connected. Inomize excels in the design and production of high performance and low cost mixed signal ASICs.

A wide range of connectivity options can be integrated into an ASIC. Inomize silicon engineers have extensive RF and digital expertise working with both internal and third-party silicon IP. Wireless options include: Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), NFC/RFID, Wi-Fi (802.11), LorRa, NB-IoT, 802.15.4 (Zigbee/6LowPAN), Wireless M-Bus, WirelessHart and 802.15.6 (wireless body area networks) and more. Inomize have developed custom sub-GHz and GHz radio systems and have experience integrating wired interfaces such as LPDDR/DDR, Ethernet, USB, MIPI CSI2 and PCIe, as well as lower complexity interfaces such as CAN, I2C, UART and SPI.

Sensing and Control

The use of mixed signal ASICs to provide an optimized interface is becoming more prevalent in industrial and automotive applications. The sensor interface where signal conversion of the sensor data occurs and the analysis, control and transmission of its data is controlled, is where Inomize expertise comes to the fore.

Inomize provides a full turnkey solution and our experience spans over the industrial, automotive and medical markets and the vast majority of sensor types and applications.

Our pedigree in analog covers low-noise sensor interfaces as well as high-voltage sensing and control using high voltage semiconductor processes. For industrial control applications this includes motor and solenoid controllers, LED and laser drivers, and for industrial sensing; low noise frontends, sense amplifiers, sigma-delta and SAR ADC designs.

Edge Processing and AI

The current trend is for the “thing” in the Industrial Internet of Things, or the functionality at the heart of any medical device, to get smarter. To meet this demand, we work with a range of IP partners to ensure selection of the most appropriate processor core or DSP to meet each device’s specific requirements. There is also an increasing trend for IoT devices to exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are among the most popular ML networks, which require a high level of matrix multiplications. Dedicated Neural Network Accelerators (NNAs) are the most efficient, achieving 10x performance levels compared to a DSP, but less flexible. Recent advances in AI/ML have led to a range of NNAs being developed by our IP partners which can be integrated into edge devices for smart processing of data from audio, video, Radar, vibration or motion sensors. IP suppliers for NNA include Arm, CEVA, Synopsys and Cadence, our engineers have the skills and experience necessary to integrate these IPs into a SoC design alongside a conventional processor, DSP and/or GPU core.

Embedded Security and Factory Automation

With the ever-increasing threat of cyber-attacks comes the need to ensure any connected device is sufficiently protected so that its operation is not disrupted, and the attack does not compromise safety, data security or profitability. Inomize has access to a broad library of internal hardware cryptographic accelerator IP and will also use 3rd party security solutions to ensure we deliver the highest level of security solutions, including:

Firmware integrity and secure boot
Secure, mutual authentication for device identification
Secure Communication with end-to-end encryption
Security life-cycle management
Tamper and side-channel attack protection