Silicon design is one of the main activities at the Creative Advanced Technology Center. We have a long history of successful designs in a wide variety of applications. We stay at the cutting edge of technology and focus on clean, well-structured designs, pushing the silicon harder and faster to reach state-of-the-art performance levels and functionality.

With our history and significant IP portfolio in audio, we have a unique ability to architect our own complete proprietary solutions for audio applications, including audio DSP architecture and design. Two particularly pivotal chip designs for Creative were designed at the Creative Advanced Technology Center - the EMU 8000, used in the Creative AWE series of sound cards, and the groundbreaking EMU 10k1, the heart of the Creative SB-Live sound card. Particular challenges in silicon design for audio include verification of audio processing functionality in a pre-silicon design environment - to this end we make significant use of emulation to verify huge amounts of audio data before committing to silicon.

With silicon geometries down in the deep submicron range, 0.18um and below, it is now cost-effective to integrate entire systems onto a single chip. ATC routinely designs chips containing multiple processors, along with complex peripherals and communications controllers. Managing complex designs like these is a crucial part of achieving integration and performance goals on large chips of this nature.