Leuven-based chip design house ICsense is scaling up its bench test facilities by 40 percent and installing automated test equipment (ATE). With this expansion, the TDK subsidiary aims to offer its customers in the automotive, medical, industrial and consumer sectors a one-stop shop for custom, mass-production-ready ASICs. The investment in the newly installed Advantest V93000 Smart Scale platform enables ICsense engineers to perform advanced analog, mixed-signal and high-voltage testing, bringing their design and test programming process entirely in-house.
“There are only a few IC design houses in the world and, typically, these companies design custom chips internally but not necessarily have the in-house resources to do the steps that follow,” explains Bram De Muer, co-founder and CEO of ICsense. “It takes several years to develop a custom IC. The team that develops the chip knows it inside out, making it vitally important that the test development team is also in-house to bring the product to mass production successfully.”