Semiconductor companies are operating in a divergent world of rapid change across markets, applications and technologies. Ever-changing access to markets makes business performance and valuation unpredictable. Meanwhile, high volume applications like PC, tablet and smartphone are stagnating – moving the focus for growth into more fragmented markets.

This means fresh challenges but also opportunity. The divergence of applications makes it harder to strike the right balance of specificity and generality to be competitive across the widest number of applications and achieve optimal ROI.

Opportunity comes by exploiting application specific architectures and processing cores, enabling significant breakthroughs in power performance area (PPA). This is the way to put clear water between you and your competitors.

What we do

We are the only company in the world that combines such deep expertise across silicon, IP and product development. It provides semiconductor companies with an insightful, independent, unbiased approach to develop silicon strategies and IP that can access new markets and applications, enhancing value for their customers and creating defensible innovation for market differentiation.

Silicon strategies

Our market and application insights, combined with application system design expertise, helps semiconductor companies craft the optimal industry requirements for their next-gen silicon. The aim is optimal ROI from the right balance across specification, volume and defined market.

Ultimately, our services can help you succeed by determining the market and user features of most value.

Optimal IP for silicon

IP independence allows us to work with semiconductor companies to help specify next-gen silicon that meets the needs of the target market, the application and the interests of their business.

This ensures IP strategies are optimised for the most valuable AI workloads and ecosystems, creating market differentiation and maximum business value.

Go-to-market strategies

CC’s expertise here spans application software, tools and development experiences. You can tap into our user experience design services to build application software, development tools and environments that are characterised by seamless integration and usability.

Clients benefit from increased market adoption with improved customer satisfaction and retention. Lower support overhead, higher margins and quicker time to market also characterise our approach.

Application specific IP

We help clients develop chip architectures, IP and designs that are highly specific to applications and achieve market-leading power performance area (PPA). This spans everything from hardware accelerators for ultra-low-power consumption to entire systems on a chip (SoCs).

Supported by our in-house ecosystem for creating custom DSP cores, our technology services deliver optimisation for specific applications, increasing performance against cost and significantly reducing power consumption.

Arm Approved

As an Arm Approved Design Partner, we are part of a carefully selected global network of design service companies. Our deep expertise across IP, silicon and product development helps ambitious companies leverage Arm IP to create the products and services that transform their markets.

With an independent approach and diverse market experience, we support a broad range of clients, from tier one semiconductor companies to world-leading brands. Our particular strengths in chip strategies, bespoke system architectures and design and development ensure the optimal technical and commercial solution.

Featured insights

Our expertise

Electronics are central to almost every product we develop – they make a device smart, allow it to communicate with other systems or enable it to perform an action.

Electronic engineering has been a core skill since our inception in 1960 and we have been developing ASICs since the late 1980s.

From integrated circuits and embedded systems to power supply and analogue circuitry, our electronic designs push the boundaries of performance, cost, size and efficiency.

We have the world’s largest independent wireless development team. It spans radio frequency, communications protocol, digital signal processing, power-optimised analogue and digital electronic design, embedded software, user experience and mechanical design.

Our consultancy expertise has led to the creation and development of several major wireless technologies and delivered a steady stream of disruptive breakthroughs. They include RF and satellite telecommunications to the world’s first wireless pacemaker and the ground-to-air radio system that controls more than 50% of the world’s air traffic.

Devices containing wireless connectivity, audio, video, measurement sensors or automatic control require digital signal processing (DSP). Extensive knowledge of this is combined with software development and software/hardware integration experience to create next-generation devices.

We are pioneering highly integrated, application-specific programmable processors, enabling the adoption of software-defined radio in wireless, cellular and satellite networks. This includes the use of the low-power MEMS sensor in innovative location, tracking and medical applications.

Our teams research and design signal algorithms using the industry standard tools provided in MathWorks MATLAB. Many of the applications we work on involve significant power constraints, adding another dimension to algorithm and processing hardware design. By applying signal conditioning we can enhance audio and improve signal quality.

If you want to transform your physical product business through digital, or you’re an existing service provider looking to deliver a radical experience to accelerate growth in a new market, we can help.

From platform selection to building the technology and integrating it with existing processes and systems, we know what it takes to develop successful digital platforms that span the physical and digital worlds.

We have expertise in digital security, AI, UX, and full-service development including the go-to-market strategy, launch plan and ongoing scaling and operations.

CC has a deep understanding of AI and its applications, including Bayesian inference, real-time signal processing and data analysis combined with extensive technical skills in areas such as predictive analytics, deep learning, edge AI and empathetic AI.

We are pushing the boundaries of the human-machine interface to develop edge AI use cases, generative AI models, new supervised machine learning models and types of data analytics.

Our work is unlocking new frontiers in areas such as uncrewed aerial vehicles, synthetic biology, remote monitoring systems, telecoms and beyond.

Markets and technologies evolve rapidly and unpredictably. Very few companies can afford to develop all relevant technologies, so tough choices need to be made. We help identify opportunities to ‘build, borrow or buy’ new technologies in anticipation of market requirements.

Business transformation is typically driven by a combination of internal, industry-related, and external factors, often rooted in technology. And whilst technology-based disruption is nothing new, the speed at which new offerings have built scale has been unprecedented.

The expertise we employ as technology strategy consultants has been in existence at Cambridge Consultants for decades. Because our consultants are engineers and scientists with deep technical insight, they can identify golden opportunities and recommend an innovation portfolio or technology roadmap.

We ensure that not only is the technology is understood but that the business model, market offerings and operations are all set up for success.

Our facilities

Electronic production

CC’s flexible, responsive and agile manufacturing facilities are ideally suited to electronic and electromechanical product builds, enabling us to rapidly build short product runs to an extremely high quality.

We can build our own printed circuit board assemblies using industrial representative equipment to ensure manufacturability during design.

Having our own in-house facility is also extremely helpful in development, driving out DfX activities in eCAD and feeding test results back into the design process from an early stage.

EMC test chamber

Our fully-shielded ETS-Lindgren anechoic test chamber is suitable for a wide range of EMC and RF testing, which is essential for new devices.

It allows us to test for unwanted radiation and susceptibility to interference at an early stage with the results fed directly into product design, rather than later on when changes will be expensive to implement.

Anechoic test chamber

Our custom anechoic radio and antenna test chamber is a highly sophisticated 5m cube.

Inside, we carry out automated 3D measurements and visualisation of wireless device behaviour and test body-worn technology using body phantoms or real live test subjects to optimise real-word RF performance of products such as smart implants (including implanted telemetry), connected drug delivery devices and wearables.

Our anechoic test chamber is available as a standalone service for industry and academic research. Explore the facility and find out how you can access this state-of-the-art service.

AI infrastructure

CC’s comprehensive onsite compute infrastructure allows us to explore options and train and test models more rapidly to get better results.

We run petaflop-scale, containerised compute on site, with multiple NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning supercomputers and other GPU and FPGA-accelerated servers. This links to petabyte-scale local NetApp storage, project-specific cloud and our continuous integration systems.

Our experts

Deep tech

Are you curious about new technologies, and how they can lead to long-term sustainable value?

We think creatively at the intersection of business and technology, inventing solutions to redefine what you do.

Industries

You need a partner with intimate knowledge of your industry and proven experience of delivering value from deep tech breakthroughs.

Discover more about the work we do in your sector and how we can create real commercial advantage for you.

Insights

Take a look at the latest insights, ideas and perspectives from CC.

Explore a cross-section of up-to-date content on the deep tech trends shaping the future of business and society.

Careers

Are you looking for an opportunity for your abilities to be recognised, and make a real difference?

Whether you are just starting out or you’re an experienced professional, we would love to hear from you.