We were developing a system which had the potenetial to be installed in every home in england so it made sense from an early stage to think about producing an asic which would perform the signal processing and contain a processor core and several other functions,if you look at an english electricity meter you might see one model which has an opitical sensor mounted on the front glass,this is looking at the rotating wheel and apart from reading the rotation speed it is detecting reversal and that is controlled from the same asic.I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with using itran devices.
I am just wondering what your application is because it souns as if you are redoing a lot of the work that we did