About us
Essensium is fabless chip-company that offers the technologies for location-aware Wireless Sensor Networks. Combining the advantages of a system-on-chip approach and the unique location-aware LOST technology, enables customers to deploy wireless sensor applications that are innovative and affordable.
Essensium is also offering the SoC integration services to customers that need the benefit of silicon integration to cost down their systems by replacing system-on-PCB solutions by SoC solutions. A SoC approach integrates embedded processors, logic hardware blocks, memories, interface controllers, analog functions, and software into a single chip solution.
The company's conception originated from the growing need of customers to develop complex and innovative products and applications in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks, that start with low or moderate volumes. The big semiconductor suppliers rather tend to concentrate on filling their fabs with high volume consumer chips for PCs and mobile phones, absorbing all their scarce resources to master the expanding complexity of both processes and the design for these applications.
Core skills:
-
Standard Products : Adding Location Tracking and Low Power Communication to Wireless Sensor Networking
Essensium developed a wireless technology that operates in the ISM bands and that supports accurate ranging for indoor location tracking. Wireless transceivers based on this patented technology combine communications with high accuracy location tracking, making them suitable for many applications such as wireless sensor networking, asset tracking, security, logistics, active RFID systems, and Real Time Location Systems (RTLS).
Wavenis is the ultra-low power communication technology developed by Coronis. It also operates in the ISM band and allows secure communication of a few kbps over distances that exceed 1 km at very low power. Battery lifetimes of 10 years and more are in reach.
-
System-on-Chip and System-in-Package ASICs: from System Concept to ASIC Delivery
New and advanced products require a System-on-Chip approach embedding processors, logic hardware blocks, memories, controllers, analog front-ends, advanced interfaces, and software. Essensium acts as a One-Stop-SoC integrator and handles the whole design chain from top-level technical specification down to integration testing of hardware and software. Essensium adds key value to the stages of the development with highest impact on the successful delivery of a competitive SoC solution: architecture design, integration (both hardware and software) and top-level verification. Essensium also organizes foundry, assembly and test services in order to deliver prototype chips, pre-production runs and volume production of final products, tested and packaged.
Essensium maximizes the benefits of any SoC-SiP implementation by optimizing the SoC-SiP architecture through the correct trade-offs between analogue and digital, or hardware, software and the partitioning in the different dies. Including multi-chip packages allows Essensium to take the best of different technologies without having to pay for it. At the same time, Essensium builds a framework to validate the individual components and to guarantee the correct interoperability and overall performance and quality of the SoC.
As a spin-off from IMEC, Essensium can stay abreast of the latest developments in innovative system architecture concepts and design methods for low-power, wireless, portable systems. The IMEC environment also offers a rich pool of semiconductor design talent from which Essensium can grow its team. Essensium is currently engaged in several research programs with IMEC and its affiliated University research groups in order to develop innovative wireless radio technologies for the active RFID and wireless sensor networking markets.
Through its strategic relation with wafer foundry Silterra, Essensium can provide priority access to advanced technologies even at low and moderate volumes.
-
Embedded Wireless ASICs: Embedded Low Power CMOS Radio Tranceivers
Essensium's team has a vast experience in bringing to the market high-speed wireless chips, including Bluetooth and Wifi chipsets. Therefore it can offer its customers the opportunity to develop ASICs with embedded wireless CMOS transceivers for radio frequencies ranging from a few MHz to several GHz.
-
Silicon for System-on-Chip
Essensium moreover can provide priority access to advanced technologies even at low and moderate volumes through its partnership with Silterra. The technologies offered are optimized to match the requirements of new developments and provide a very cost effective alternative to products designed in the latest technology node.
-
Embedded SW Development
Essensium delivers development, technical consulting, tool chains, training and support for Linux and eCos on embedded systems.
Essensium can help with the architecture definition, implementation of an Embedded Linux or eCos platform and the different (wired and wireless) networking stacks on new embedded systems. For very small footprint systems, Essensium can also develop boot loaders and operational code directly on the hardware, without operating system.
Essensium also delivers the tool chains (based on GNU and mainly targeted at ARM, Xscale, PowerPC, MIPS and x86) and will make sure these tool chains cooperate fluently with the development environment already in place at the customer. The technical development and support is based on experience from executing a large number of embedded Linux, eCos and networking projects.