Agile Analog is keen to build footprint in Asia-Pacific

Pete Hutton, Executive Chairman of Agile Analog, a supplier of highly configurable, process node-agnostic analog IP building blocks, today announced that the company has responded to surging demand from chip manufacturers in the Asia-Pacific region by establishing its first regional sales and engineering support operation, based in Taipei, Taiwan. Mr. Hutton stated that the new Asia-Pacific sales and engineering support team will enable Agile Analog to provide a more immediate response to requests from its Asian customers and prospects. It will also intensify the collaboration between Agile Analog and its foundry partners in the region.  The Asia Pacific region’s sales team includes technical support provided by a field applications engineer based in Taiwan, and is set to expand in 2022 to include additional sales and engineering staff.

As well as setting up a direct sales operation to serve customers in Asia, Agile Analog has also signed franchise agreements with distributors in the region: Shanghai Lomicro Information Technology serving China, and Ryoden for Japan. Agile Analog’s move to expand its sales and customer service capability in Asia follows rapid growth in demand for its analog building-block IP – functions such as power regulation, data conversion, security monitoring, and temperature and current sensing – at advanced nodes below 10nm. As foundries and chip manufacturers refine their processes at these advanced nodes, the design rules are continually modified, invalidating the use of IP created for earlier versions of the design rules. For most sources of IP, including both chip manufacturers’ own in-house libraries and conventional third-party IP suppliers, it is almost impossible to support these advanced nodes because of the time and expense required to reconfigure existing IP in response to regular modifications of the design rules as the processes mature. Agile Analog alone can maintain the compatibility of its building block IP with these advanced nodes, because its unique Composa technology enables it to reconfigure IP automatically and almost instantly.

Lisa Yang, the lead of Agile Analog APAC who heads up the new operation, said: ‘Wherever in the world chip design is taking place, most of the fabrication takes place at foundries in Asia. Agile Analog sales and engineering staff on the ground in the region will maintain and strengthen our relationships with these foundries, while helping the many chip companies and design houses in the region to take advantage of Agile Analog’s unique configurable IP, which can be optimized for any foundry, node and application.’