Case Study: American Microsystems, Inc. achieves rapid FPGA-to-ASIC migration and 2-hour translator setup with Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL

American Microsystems, Inc. - Customer Case Study

American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI), a leading supplier of ASICs to the electronics industry, needed to convert customer FPGA prototypes into optimized, low-cost ASICs and to respond quickly to constantly changing design and netlist formats. To support this, AMI built its Access Design Tools suite (including the NETRANS FPGA-to-ASIC translator) on Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL ANSI Common Lisp to provide an extensible, integrated environment for processing IC design data.

Using Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL, AMI implemented NETRANS as a reusable, rapidly extensible Lisp environment, cutting translator setup time from about six months to roughly two hours and enabling sales to promise near-immediate support. The Franz Inc. solution also improved developer productivity, reduced staffing needs, sped edit-compile-debug cycles, and supported a business model that converts costly FPGA implementations (often several hundred dollars each) into ASICs costing as little as $10–$15 in volume.

American Microsystems, Inc.

Bob Kirk

CAD Research Manager