Pan-European start-up European Silicon Structures, which began life three years ago this month as a venture capital start-up with support from big names such as Olivetti, Philips and Saab Scania, gave the press an update this week on its progress from a company with no customers and unproven technology back in 1985 to the fourth largest supplier of cell-based application specific integrated circuits. ES2, as the company likes to call itself, shipped over $6m of ASICs in 1987 according to Dataquest, putting it behind only VLSI Technology in the US and Austria Micro Systeme and Rifa in Europe, and above giants such as Texas Instruments, AT&T and SGS Thomson. The approach is to offer customers a package that allows them to design custom silicon in house, using a range of silicon design tools running on MS-DOS micros, DEC VAX or Unix workstations from Apollo Computer and Sun Microsystems: the tools generate the designs, and include design verification and testing, and the data is then passed on to ES2 for prototyping and eventual full production, if required. The tools range from the MS-DOS Solo 12, for simpler random logic designs, through to the Solo 1200, for analogue cells with two fixed RAM blocks, and the Solo 1400, announced yesterday, which for the first time allows designers to generate RAM, ROM and programmable logic array blocks of the size required, automatically from pre-designed sub-cells. The advantage, according to marketing director Paul Gibson, is both faster design and a lower chip count, leading to cheaper end products. ES2 says it will accept orders from low volume prototypes through to high volume orders, and has access throuh partners such as Philips to high-volume foundries if they are required. It says it should exceeed shipment targets this year: it has shipped 227 designs to customers so far this year, and hopes for 366 by year end, an average one per day – 1988 is a leap year.
