About the company

The smart semiconductor company

Cologne Chip AG is a semiconductor manufacturer that offers telecommunications ICs, intellectual property (IP) as well as FPGAs. The GateMate FPGA family sets a new standard for small to mid-size FPGAs. Since Cologne Chip AG can look back on a company history of more than 25 years, its customers benefit with GateMateTM FPGAs from an excellent industry knowledge and a design and manufacturing location "Made in Germany".

History of Cologne Chip AG

In 1994 a group of German electronic engineers founds Cologne Chip Designs with the objective to develop and manufacture the ASICs required for ISDN equipment. Already two years later, Cologne Chip Designs attains the technological leadership with the world’s first single-chip solution for ISDN add-on cards for Internet access: the “HFC-S”. This chip development is succeeded by a series of innovations for PC applications: 1997 the first single-chip solution for PCMCIA, 1998 for PCI and 2000 for USB. By the end of 1998, the successful start-up exports its feature-rich ISDN transceivers Designed in Germany to over 20 countries in the world, among them China, Taiwan and the U.S. The following years, Cologne Chip Designs exceeds all expectations by a yearly growth rate of about 100% and millions of sold chips.

Due to the continuous success, Cologne Chip Designs becomes a limited company by shares in May 2000 under the new firm Cologne Chip AG. The company gains additional strength by a significantly increased share capital. As a result of customer driven development, new chip families with additional line interface technologies are successfully launched on the market between 2002 and 2006: Now ICs with Primary Rate and ISDN Up0/UpN interfaces are available besides ICs for Basic Rate Access. Especially XHFC Series turns out to be the most modern ISDN solution world-wide available – with a perfect longevity prospect.

In the year 2005 the company expands its business activities by offering building blocks for ASIC projects, so called IP cores: Once again it is a remarkable innovation that allows to implement analog chip functionality in pure digital CMOS architecture. This leads to an outstanding reduction of the silicon size required, for instance for CODECs which are offered by Cologne Chip, too.

As the first decade of the company’s history was dominated by ISDN chips tailored for Internet access and PC applications, the years from 2004 onwards set the focus on ISDN voice applications: Besides the usage in traditional telephony networks, ISDN interfaces are more and more utilized in CPE equipment for today’s IP-based Next Generation Networks.

Cologne Chip follows the latest developments in broadband access technologies, providing its ISDN transceivers to all kinds of Residential Gateways for the Central European market. In this way the company gains an important share in the transition to IP telephony from the year 2010 onwards.

In 2020, Cologne Chip introduces GateMateTM FPGA: A family of chips that sets a new standard for small to mid-size FPGAs. The programmable silicon can be used in low-power and speed applications and is therefore suitable for a variety of applications: industry, automation, communications, security, automotive, IoT, lighting and many others. Because of the outstanding ratio of circuit size to cost, even price-sensitive applications now can also take advantage of these new FPGAs.

Since Cologne Chip AG can look back on a company history of more than 25 years, its customers benefit with GateMateTM FPGAs  from an excellent industry knowledge, an experienced team and a design and manufacturing location “Made in Germany”. GateMateTM FPGAs are funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy.