Peregrine expands foundry alliances

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Continuing its fabless push, RF-chip maker Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. has completed the final qualification phase in the process transfer of its silicon-on-sapphire technology to foundry provider MagnaChip Semiconductor Ltd.

Peregrine (San Diego) is also working with another, undisclosed foundry.

Meanwhile, Peregrine and South Korea's MagnaChip began the final qualification phase of the technology transfer in 2008 and released it to production eight weeks ago. The process was installed in MagnaChip's Cheongju wafer manufacturing facility.

Now, Peregrine has three foundry partners: MagnaChip, Oki and Sapphicon Semiconductor.

Last year, Sapphicon Semiconductor, a privately-funded company, acquired the semiconductor fabrication facility of Peregrine Semiconductor, which is located in Australia.

Sapphicon will transition from being a captive fab that manufactures integrated circuits solely for Peregrine, to a product and technology development and manufacturing company.

Sapphicon also licensed the silicon-on-sapphire process technology from Peregrine and will design a range of high performance mixed signal and analog devices. The company will offer low cost IC prototyping services, custom chip design capability and foundry services.

As part of the acquisition Peregrine will continue to source manufacturing services from Sapphicon.

''There will be more announcements in the coming months; we have another 'large foundry' bringing up the UltraCMOS process as we speak,'' according to a Peregrine spokeswoman. ''We haven't revealed that yet -- but we expect that to be completed within the next quarter.''

Peregrine has been moving toward the fabless business model for many years now. ''MagnaChip expands our overall global manufacturing capacity, and continues our efforts to expand our supply chain to meet the strong demand for UltraCMOS products around the world,'' the spokeswoman said. ''This demand is evidenced by a recent manufacturing milestone: last quarter we shipped our 400 millionth unit -- likely making us the fastest growing new semiconductor technology in the industry.''