An Oxfordshire chip designer that creates custom integrated circuits (ASICs) for car makers, communications, industrial and healthcare customers.
EnSilica designs custom computer chips. Many of the products around us, from cars to medical wearables and satellite equipment, depend on chips made for one specific job, called ASICs. EnSilica is a fabless design house, which means it designs the chips and manages their manufacture, but pays specialist factories to make them. It offers turnkey ASICs, design services for customers that have their own chip teams, manufacturing support including packaging, testing and quality, and its own reusable designs in areas such as cryptography, radar, analogue and communications. Its markets include automotive, industrial, radio and communications, and wearables and healthcare.
EnSilica says it was founded in 2001 as a digital design and FPGA-to-ASIC consultancy, opened in Wokingham in 2002, and added analogue design in Oxford in 2016. Its stated vision is to be "the premier application specific chipmaker in Europe". Its values are grouped around people, customers, business, and community and environment, and include treating customers with courtesy and fairness and building long-term partnerships. It also lists commitments to support science and engineering education and to promote diversity in engineering, especially for women and girls.
The company's head office and registered office are at Milton Park near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Its own pages list UK design centres in Bristol and Sheffield, with earlier sites in Wokingham, Oxford and Cambridge, along with design centres in Porto Alegre and Campinas in Brazil and in Bangalore in India. It has said it employs more than 170 people, and it is listed on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market. It won a Queen's Award for Export Growth in 2018 and ranked fifth in the 2018 Sunday Times Lloyds SME Export Track 100. In 2025 it announced work on a quantum-resilient secure processor for critical national infrastructure and a licensing agreement with Codasip.
EnSilica's own Life at EnSilica page describes a supportive, collaborative engineering culture. Its core beliefs include listening well, showing humility, trusting colleagues and assuming good intent, collaborating across boundaries, seeking diverse thought and showing empathy. Newer engineers quoted on the page describe structured onboarding, regular one-to-one mentoring in their first months, and varied, challenging projects. These are the company's own claims. Ian Lankshear is named as chief executive in its pages and in 2018 coverage.
A chip design company like this employs digital and analogue chip designers, verification and test engineers, radio-frequency and mixed-signal specialists, software and firmware engineers, project managers who take a design all the way to finished silicon, and supply-chain, quality, sales and finance staff. The work ranges from satellites and electric vehicles to medical devices. Mathematics, physics, electronics and computer science are all useful starting points.
Website: www.ensilica.com
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