The increasing demand for more computation power to meet the current speed requirements of robot controllers made it clear that general purpose processors are no longer satisfactory. The recent ASIC ( Application-Specific Integrated Circuits technology was the solution that created better opportunities for implementing real-time controller for more sophisticated robot manipulators. An overview of ASIC technology for robotics was presented in [32]. In this paper, a conceptual framework for ASIC design is presented along with the characteristics of the ASIC design.
The advantages of ASIC for robotic applications include:
ASIC includes several custom and simicustom hardware designs including:
The main difference between these styles is the degree of design freedom in layout. The greater the degree of design freedom, the is the design effort and the longer the design turnaround time. Figure 7 summarizes the differences between ASIC and SIC (standard integrated circuits).
Figure 7: Comparison of traditional design and ASIC design.