SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP319: What Makes Agile Analog a Unique Company with Chris Morrison

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Daniel is joined by Chris Morrison, vice president of product marketing at Agile Analog, the customizable analog IP company. Chris has over 18 years’ experience developing strong relationships with key partners across the semiconductor industry and delivering innovative analog, digital, power management and audio products.… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of semi-Wiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Chris Morrison, vice president of product marketing at Agile Analog, the customizable analog IP company. Chris has over 18 years experienced developing strong relationships with key partners across the semiconductor industry and delivering innovative analog, digital, power management, and audio products. Previously, he worked for international companies, including Dialog Semiconductor. Welcome to the podcast, Chris. Hi, Daniel. Thanks for having me on.

Chris, let me first ask, what brought you to Agile Analog? Yes, I've been at Agile Analog coming on for three years now. And my background, I worked as a system architect for a long time before moving into product marketing. And when I was in system architecture, I'd often look at licensing analog IP, but in truth, I very rarely actually licensed it. We designed in-house. And that was because we really struggled to find the exact IP we needed. So if, for example, I was looking for an LDO that had 30 milli amps of output current, I could maybe find off the shelf on a hundred Milly amp LDO. And what I really attracted me to Agile was that they promised to give a 30

mlliaf LDO if that's what I needed, that it had the power performance in area of a 30 Mliamp LDO rather than the 100 Mliamp LDO that other providers would have off the shelf. So when I began to talk to them about potentially coming on board, that was something that really resonated with me that I thought lots of companies are going to be interested in this. And that's what brought me over here. And it turns out it's true, we can do that. And we are doing that for many customers. I had a similar experience in my career.

Analog IT was quite a challenge. So it's been a while since we chatted. How's it going at Agile Analog? You know, I'm hearing great things about your Agile, secure, anti-Tamper security portfolio. Security is a big thing right now. So why is this important and, you know, why now? know why now?

So things that Angel Analog are going great this year. Very, very busy. This is by far our best ever year. We're seeing lots of customer traction. I think we've been doing this for a few years now and we're beginning to get known in the market as a reliable provider of IP. And over the last 12 months or so, we've put a bit of a focus on our security IP. IP. We've been asked for this from various customers. We actually shipped it to our first

tier one, our first anti-tamper IP about four years ago. And since then, we've been investing and building up the portfolio. And with changing legislation, things like in Europe, the Cyber Resilience Act, the requirements for FIPS and CSEP and Common Criteria Certification, more and more customers are turning to security and adding security to their products. And it's becoming something they think about quite early in the design cycle. So it's not just a bolt on like it used to be. So for us, we think we have a really unique and a really great solution for anti- tamper, both detecting anti- tamper, tamper attempts and preventing these tamper attacks from happening in the first place.

Great. Can you tell us a little bit more about Agile Secure? Yeah. So Agile Secure is, as I mentioned, two different types of IP. First of all, we have our tamper prevention IP, which is things like capless LDOs, internally biased band gaps, oscillators, power and resets, which are there to make it difficult for somebody to tamper with what's going on inside a chip or particularly within a secure area of a chip like a secure enclave or route of trust so that's the first area the first area is try and prevent people

from tampering with your chip in the first place make it difficult for them to be able to make a tamper attack or sniff at what's going on a through a side channel attack and the second area we have and this is where we have really differentiating products from from the rest of the market is our tamper detection IP. So these are analog and mixed signal blocks for monitoring your clock and ensuring that nobody is trying to attempt to attack the system through adding clock glitches or changing the frequency of the clock or single stepping through the, through the design. It's a very common attack vector attacking the clock. Probably the second most common method for tampering with a device is glitching the supply. So we also have monitors for

detecting the voltage glitch is occurring. And recently we've added an EM sensor for detecting if somebody is using an electromagnetic probe, generating an electromagnetic field to generate clock and voltage faults within the chip. So these three together protect clocking and supplies and finally our digital temperature sensor is there to protect against thermal attacks where hackers try and take the device outside of its thermal operating window and force it into a state where it doesn't work as it should and that can do things like weak cryptographic keys and remove the security there are many studies and cases that they've been released over the last few years back going back 10 15 20 years on

big consumer, automotive, and other products that have been tampered with in these ways. And if they had had our sensors with on board them, we're confident it would have been much, much harder for an attacker to have made these attacks. Right. So this is getting to be a little bit of a crowded market, Chris. You know, what makes your product stand out from other anti-temper solutions on the market? Yeah, I think security is a hot topic right now, and therefore, where everybody is going at it, everyone's trying to have a solution there. What makes us quite different is the analog and mixed signal nature of our IP.

So most of the competition we see around anti- tamper is in active shields and very digital solutions, ring oscillator based solutions. They typically don't have the resolution or accuracy that is needed for the latest standards. Or you don't get the, you understand that attack has happened, but you don't know what type of attack. You don't know where in your I see that attack has happened. So we give better accuracy, better resolution, we can react faster, all the things you really want in a secure system. And we're partnering with a bunch of these digital guys because they acknowledge that for many applications need to extend beyond what they offer. As I think we all know, and we touched on at the start, analog is difficult.

It's hard, particularly with the many, many process nodes that these guys want to support. And that's where we really have a unique advantage with our internal tool that we have called Composa, that allows us to very quickly move this IP between process nodes and support all the range of nodes that need this security IP. Right. You know, you mentioned partnering and collaborating. So I hear that you've been collaborating with some pretty interesting companies in the security space like Rambus. You know, that's a very large, they have a very large presence in the security business. You can tell us a little bit more about this? Yeah. So we are open to working with a wide range of partners here. We've recently announced with Rambos that we're working together with them. They very much see the fit where our solution and they, their solution are very complementary. Rambus are one of the leaders in this space, and they want to increase the security of their offering by adding our anti- tamper sensors to design alongside their crypto manager IP. The customers get a more secure system that is harder for attackers to attack.

And we're working not just with Rambos, but with various others. I'm not quite ready to announce the others, but there are four or five companies at the moment that we're talking with, either in the route of trust space or the Puff space or EFPGA space, but all targeting the security sector that we're working alongside at the moment and working actively with customers

to design a joint solution in with. So Chris, in my experience, it's much easier to talk to customers about security if they've already had a security breach. But it's hard to get some companies to be proactive. So how do you do that? How do you talk to your customers about being proactive in regards to security? Yeah, so I think there's a lot of truth in that. And certainly in the past, that's been very, very much the case. So guys like the printer cartridge manufacturers, they've been very, very keen to make sure their devices are secure because they make their money

from selling printer cartridges, not the printers. And so they've been willing to invest in this, whereas maybe the more general IOT companies have seen this as less of an issue. But I think that's beginning to change. Things like Belcore and Rohammer and DFA, the very common attacks and very well-known attacks, have forged a change in the industry. Part of it is that there are more and more attacks and people don't want to be attacked. Part of it is that the people buying systems are becoming more aware of this and putting security higher up their priority list. And part of this is the government's around the world legislating for it. As we mentioned, the European Cyber Resilions Act, that's one area in particular where it's being mandated to add the security into

the systems from the end of 2027. That's going to be a requirement. So it's beginning to change. Security is becoming a higher priority. Interestingly, I would say the data center is a little bit behind in this. They are relying on the fact that it's difficult to access a data center. So there's less security currently in the data center than you might expect because they rely on physical access controls. But given that there's now data centers all over the world, they're just. communicating with each other constantly.

I think we will see over the next couple of years a big ramp up in security in this space too, even though it has been lagging automotive and defense and IoT who really got the message and know what they're doing with that at the moment. Yeah, I agree completely. Can you give us a quick update on your data conversion IP? I mean, you're really known for this.

You know, you guys have some new products capabilities coming out. Yeah, so when I joined Agile, One of the things that I felt was, while we had a really good IP offering, it was very wide, and we needed to focus our attention on a couple of areas. And the first of these was data converters, and security came after that. Data converters are still very, very important to us. We've developed on a range of nodes now, our ADCs in particular, from 180 nanometer, All the way died, we're working now in three nanometer for customers on our ADCs.

Today we're around about, we're 12-bit resolution, around about 20 to 30 mega samples per second. For some customers, they want lower than that. Again, this is where our customization allows us to give them exactly what they need. And we're in talks with customers at the moment about extending this to 14 bits resolution or to higher sample rates at 12 bits. When you look at the data conversion space, there are a lot of needs. You've got some guys addressing the very high speed data converters, but there's really a gap in the space we're playing in, which I guess synopsis five, ten years ago, largely filled that space, but they've pulled out of that. And we see a lot of interest for our 12 bit ADCs and 10 bit ADCs, even down to 2-3 nanometer where we're beginning to have discussions.

Great. What's next for Agile Analog? I see what all the events, you're very active in the ecosystem. You know, what plans do you have for 2026? Yeah, I mean, we're a big fan of the five-gray events. We tend to do as many of the foundry events as we can. Being members of the ecosystems of TSM and GF and Samsung and Intel, so we'll continue to support these going forward. Next year, I think what you will see is more and more announcements of some of the partnerships that we're working on right now. So particularly in security, but in a couple of other spaces as well, we're really working very closely with some of the big names in the industry. You'll see more of these announcements coming next year, Rambos, having been the first one we did this year. And to tie in with our security theme, we're going to have much more positioning on security.

going forward so you'll see us at the security events that we did one or two of this year, but next year we will push that a bit further. Over the last 12 months we have really grown exponentially. We forecast that's going to continue into next year. We can already see a really strong pipeline for next year. So we're looking to grow the team to probably almost double the size of the team over the next 12 to 18 months to address the the customer leads that we have in front of us. Great. Thank you, Chris, for your time. Nice to talk to you again, and we'll certainly catch up with you again next year. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.