HomeNewsChip design centers choose Twente: opening AnSem

Chip design centers choose Twente: opening AnSem 'Innovation on chip'

The chip design house AnSem from Leuven, Belgium, chooses Twente for its new design center. In this way, the company is close to other high-tech companies and close to the chip design group of UT Professor Bram Nauta.

There is a trend going on: several companies specialized in semiconductor chip design, choose Twente as their new base. “Professionals in this field are hard to find, there’s a lot of competition. Apart from that, we like to be in the proximity of other high-tech companies and facilities”, Stefan Gogaert, CEO of AnSem, says. His company opened a second design center at Kennispark Twente last Thursday. He is typically looking for the type of professionals coming from the IC Design group of Prof Bram Nauta at the University of Twente. This group has a very good reputation in the world. Nauta: “We can strengthen each other mutually, by collaborating in research projects. The typical design issues of a company can be reason for research in our lab. For the Twente region, it is important to keep talented people aboard. With a growing concentration of this type of companies, we build critical mass.”

Alumnus

The AnSem center in Enschede has a modest start, with five designers. Dr Clemens Mensink, who is the local director, expects a growth towards 25 employees. He studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Twente and also did his PhD there. Some years ago he founded, together with some others, Axiom IC which was also a ‘fabless design house’- a design centre without production facilities of its own. In 2013 Axiom IC was acquired by Teledyne DALSA. Mensink started looking for another entrepreneurial challenge and started negotiations with AnSem.


Stefan Gogaert, Clemens Mensink and Bram Nauta 

The specialists in analog ‘application specific’ chips (ASIC’s) work on applications in health and automotive, for example. These involve quantities of between 10,000 and 1,000,000 chips: this is the lower volume and specialized market. AnSem doesn’t just deliver the knowledge and design to its customers, but the chips as well. Chip manufacturing is then done by a giant like TSMC in Taiwan, advanced chip testing by MASER Engineering, one of the neighbours at Kennispark Twente and a UT spinoff company. In this way, AnSem always works in a network with others.

Contact lens  

A true showpiece of AnSem is a contact lens, developed together with the Swiss company Sensimed. The contact lens has a chip built-in, for determining eye pressure of patients suffering from glaucoma. In this way, measurements can take place the whole day, during various sorts of activities of the patient. The ‘fancy’ gold-coloured edge of the lens is meant for wireless power supply and for transporting the pressure measurements to a computer or smartphone. Another example, shown at AnSem’s opening, is a tiny and energy efficient satellite radio for tracking wildlife, even under water.

Apart from AnSem and TeleDyne DALSA, the company ItoM (Semiconductor Ideas to the Market) chose to open a branch in Twente. And there are companies with a longer history like 3T in Enschede, Aemics in Oldenzaal and Bruco in Borne.  

ir. W.R. van der Veen (Wiebe)
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