Sarnoff Europe today announced that it has reached an important milestone in its intellectual property alliance with UMC. The TakeCharge® on-chip ESD protection solutions are now silicon proven in three UMC CMOS technologies.
Sarnoff’s customized ESD solutions are available for UMC-produced 130nm CMOS, 180nm High Voltage CMOS and 65nm CMOS chips. The solutions are all complementary to UMC foundry rules and help customers design custom I/O and interface designs when standard available solutions cannot be used.
Sarnoff ESD technology offers customers easy, low threshold access to silicon-proven design solutions for custom requirements, including low capacitance, low leakage, small area, and high ESD performance. Customers can cost-effectively buy or license the specific cell they need to complete the ESD protection of their IC.
“With the addition of Sarnoff Europe’s TakeCharge on-chip ESD protection design solutions to our IP Alliance Program, UMC customers will have easy access to superior ESD design solutions from an industry wide recognized leader in its field,” said Ken Liou, director of the IP and Design Support Division at UMC.
Sarnoff Europe provides ESD solutions that are complementary to public, foundry or partner-owned solutions. Sarnoff Europe’s solutions focus on high ESD performance (e.g. IEC-61000-4-2 level 4) for harsh IC environments, or advanced low capacitive (<100fF) clamps for high speed SerDes or RF applications, or low leakage (< 1nA) approaches for mobile or green applications. These silicon proven solutions are available for various process nodes and foundries under the TakeCharge brand name.
“Our alliance with UMC means that customers will achieve shorter design cycles for proven specialty solutions optimized with advanced ESD protection,” said Koen Verhaege, executive director of Sarnoff Europe. “Together, Sarnoff and UMC can better meet the specialized needs of our customers by bringing cost efficient, higher-quality solutions to market much faster.”
The complete list of available ESD protection solutions for UMC’s CMOS technologies is available online at: http://ipmaster.umc.com/IPCatalog/ (‘Specialty IO’ / ‘ESD’ category).
Sarnoff’s ESD design solutions are product proven in more than 500 commercially released ICs in nano, standard and high voltage (HV) CMOS, BiCMOS and Bipolar CMOS DMOS (BCD) processes.
Sarnoff’s TakeCharge product proven ESD protection is licensed for a broad spectrum of applications such as ASICs, FPGAs, LCD drivers, power, consumer and communications ICs. TakeCharge customers include leading IDM, fabless and foundry IC producers worldwide, including Toshiba, Altera, Infineon, ST, Ricoh, OKI, Sony, Fujitsu, Renesas, Panasonic, Seiko Epson, NJR, PMC-Sierra, ON, AMIS, RedMere, Nanotech, Silicon Image, Gennum, Actel, CamSemi, THine, Inphi, Energy Micro, Inside Contactless, Cissoid, Tower and others.