IP update from Alphacore at DAC 2026

Rusafa Shahreen, Director of Technical Marketing at Alphacore met with me at DAC 2026 to provide an update on what’s new in their IP for AMS, RF, imaging and rad-hard designs. Her background includes MSEE and MBA degrees, plus seven years at Alphacore in Arizona. The founders of the company have a rad-hard background and their early work was on DOD contracts, growing the company organically over the years without using any venture capital.

Alphacore serves both the commercial and military markets with their IP. At DAC 2026 Rusafa saw AI as a big theme, while DAC 2025 emphasized chiplets and little agentic AI. The annual GOMACTech Conference was in March, where government systems engineers heard about data converters, PLLs, transceivers, RF blocks, high-resolution imaging, power converters and rad-hard technologies.

Foundries that support their IP include GF 22FDX and 12nm, TSMC for 28nm and 12/6FFC for automotive, STMicroelectronics FD-SOI, X-Fab and Tower Semi. In addition to IP, they offer custom ASIC services or IP block customization. For designs like Radar that require a high Spurious-Free Dynamic Range (SFDR), look for an upcoming demonstration on-chip soon, where their IP can take SFDR from 45db to 75db.

The company has employees in both India and Arizona, which supports a hybrid work culture and remote work is used.  At this DAC there was a panel discussion including Rusafa on the topic, Build vs Buy: Who Owns the Intelligence Behind Tomorrow’s Chips? Her position was that AI must be adopted for EDA and IP development, but AI isn’t replacing designers, instead it is helping designers become more productive.

Looking towards the future we can expect to see reconfigurable IP for data converters used in communication and sensing applications, handling tasks beyond 5G and 6G, by having one chip provide multiple functions with goal of 64 Giga-Samples per Second.

Summary

AMS, RF and data converter IP are difficult to design and verify across a variety of foundries, and Alphacore has created many IP blocks to meet the needs of both commercial and military markets. They are active at many industry events this year, like: DAC, GOMAC, GlobalFoundries Technology Symposium, Microelectronics US 2026 Conference, 2026 Microelectronics Reliability Workshop, IEEE NSREC, SEE-SOCS 2026, IIOM International Symposium 2026, D&R IP-SoC Silicon Valley 2026, 43^rd Annual Space Power Workshop.

Read their White Paper on, Microelectronics Paving the Way for 6G: Critical Role of Advanced Semiconductors.

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