PCASIC establishes an in-house, best practice, design methodology for designing and verifying products containing ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits).
PCASIC has enabled Fint to design their own ASIC's in-house, with a proven design flow, using low-cost design tools for PC-platforms, and system prototyping by using Xilinx FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate-Arrays). Thereby keeping the basic system knowledge in-house, and reducing time-to-market, while at the same time putting more functionality into the products, keeping the product's physical size small. The design flow was established, and an ASIC developed, containing a link layer protocol for fieldbus systems. Fieldbus system applications are used in offshore installations and industrial automation and control systems.
Fint AS is developing products for industrial automation and control, including fieldbus communication and control systems, and intelligent transmitters and sensors. PCASIC enables Fint to continue to upgrade their fieldbus products by designing new ASIC's for current and future fieldbus systems and other industry standard communication systems. The modularity of our system enables us to develop and sell fieldbus couplers of widely differing complexity and functionality both to the industrial and offshore markets.
Project URL : http://www.ecsi.org/earnest/projects/PCASIC/default.htm