- 11 May 2006 -

High-voltage CMOS foundry launched by austriamicrosystems

At the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) Supplier Expo in Munich, austriamicrosystems announced the offering of its leading-edge 0.35 micron High-Voltage CMOS technology H35 with an additional set of 120V NMOS and PMOS devices. The new extension allows the integration of 3.3V, 5V, 20V, 50V and 120V devices on a single chip without any process changes.

H35 is the first purely CMOS based High-Voltage process that matches BCD performance and chip sizes at much lower process complexity. It is based on the 0.35um CMOS process transferred from TSMC. Rigorous modularity permits 100% reuse of low voltage CMOS design IP. H35 offers fully scalable High-Voltage NMOS and PMOS devices, floating logic libraries as well as a best-in-class power-on resistance. This makes the High-Voltage CMOS technology a competitive solution for fabless design houses and IDMs in fields such as power-management products, display drivers, broadband and wireless applications, modems, sensors, capacitive actuators, printer and MEMS driver ICs.

For its fully automotive and medical qualified process, austriamicrosystems delivers its industry benchmark design environment ("HIT-Kit"), which comes complete with IO libraries, special utilities optimized for High-Voltage CMOS product design and excellent characterized circuit simulation models. New High-Voltage designs utilizing the 120V devices can already be started in the H35 50V process option, which is available for volume production today. All 50V devices and blocks can be reused without any layout modifications in the 120V option. Engineering runs supporting the 120V process option are already offered to dedicated customers, volume production will be available by end of 2006.

"The new 0.35um High-Voltage CMOS process is the 5th generation of the continuously improved High-Voltage technologies from our company and is produced in austriamicrosystems state-of-the-art 8-inch wafer fabrication. As only two mask level adders on top of CMOS are required it also makes H35 the process with the lowest complexity in the market. All of this makes H35 the optimum choice for achieving smallest possible die sizes at very competitive cost for a voltage range from 20V to 120V", said Peter Gasteiner, Senior Vice President and General Manager of austriamicrosystems' business unit Full ServiceFoundry.

www.austriamicrosystems.com