Barry Paterson is appointed Agile Analog CEO

“Agile Analog is at a key point in its growth to becoming a major player in the semiconductor industry,” said Paterson. “Our funding round of $19m last year gave the company the resources to be able to re-architect our process agnostic technology from the ground up, and I’m looking forward to getting that technology into the hands of more analog designers as a result of our recruitment drive to increase our engineering headcount by over 50% this year.

“We truly have a disruptive technology that is changing analog design within the industry by enabling analog IP to be automatically generated rather than hand crafted every time.”

Peter Hutton, Agile Analog’s Chairman added: “The Board ran an extensive international search for the right CEO to be able to take Agile Analog from its success in building the platform to scale to more IP and more customers. I’m delighted that Barry has joined us to take the company forward. We couldn’t ask for a better combination of technical knowledge, commercial experience, strategic vision, operational expertise and passion to get our technology in the hands of the wider semiconductor industry.”    

Agile Analog has a unique way to automatically generate analog IP to exactly meet the customer’s specifications and process technology. Called Composa, it uses tried and tested analog IP circuits that are in the company’s Composa library. Effectively, the design-once-and-re-use-many-times model of digital IP now applies to analog IP for the first time. As the analog IP circuits in the Composa library have been extensively tested and used in previous designs, and are fully validated every time they are generated, this gives a similar level of reassurance to the digital IP world’s ‘silicon-proven’.

Importantly for the customer, the Composa automated approach creates bespoke and verified analog IP solutions reducing time to market and increasing quality. It also means that Composa can simply regenerate the analog IP solution using the PDK for a customer on a different process technology when needed, for example when switching to a different foundry or shrinking the chip to suit a smaller node. Effectively, the company has created the world’s first, automatically generated, process-agnostic analog IP.

The demand for analog technology is growing every year, and has been estimated to be valued at $83.2bn in 2022 according to IC Insights’ 2022 McClean Report.