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yalanand
GREAT-Terry
A walkie-talkie chipset! Company from Chongqing! These all makes me feel the ...
Chinese fabless firm selects U.S. foundry
Peter Clarke
6/21/2011 9:12 AM EDT
LONDON – Southwest Integrated Circuit Design Co. Ltd. (SWID), a fabless IC chip company in Chongqing, China, has selected silicon-germanium BiCMOS manufacturing process technologies for its next radio frequency ICs and to have them manufactured in Newport Beach, California.
The move was announced by Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (Migdal Haemek, Israel), which trades as TowerJazz reflecting the fact it took over Jazz Technologies Inc. in 2008, including the Jazz 200-mm wafer fab in Newport Beach. The move is unusual, a reversal of a west-to-east flow of fabless design to foundry manufacturing in Taiwan. In this case a Chinese design is flowing from east-to-west to be manufactured in California. It partly reflects the increasing maturity of Chinese design and partly the specialized nature of silicon-germanium manufacturing.
SWID is announcing availability of an integrated walkie-talkie chip (XN239) and a low noise amplifier (XN255) to complement an integrated RF tuner IC previously announced.
The XN239 is manufactured using the SBC35 0.35-micron process and is a multi-function transceiver chip. It includes a built-in power detector as well as a processor core to perform functional control through a serial interface which can significantly reduce the need of other discrete components and reduce the total bill-of-materials cost of the walkie-talkie. The XN239 is designed to operate at 460-MHz with a first-order intermediate frequency (IF) of 21.7-MHz and a second IF of 450-kHz or 455-kHz.
The XN255 is built using the SBC18 0.18-micron process and is a low noise amplifier (LNA) for GPS applications. It operates from a 2.7 to 3.3-V source, consumes 3-mA active, with an idle current of less than 10-microamps.
Lin Fan, president of SWID, said that Tower provided accurate models and "excellent" technical support, in a statement issued by Tower.
"SWID is a very important customer and an RF communication applications leader as well as a significant company within the Chinese region and we will continue to support them as their strategic foundry of choice for SiGe solutions," said Marco Racanelli, senior vice president at Tower.
SWID is one of many companies covered in an upcoming special report on China's fabless chip companies. For information on how to obtain a copy of the "China Fabless Profile," drop a line to: peter.clarke@ubm.com
Related links and articles:
www.swid.com.cn
www.towersemi.com
News articles:
Tower rolls SiGe process
Tower swings back to loss in Q1
Tower foundry opens Shanghai office
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resistion
6/21/2011 9:35 AM EDT
No surprise TSMC couldn't take an order from China.
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peter.clarke
6/21/2011 9:49 AM EDT
@resistion
because?
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resistion
6/21/2011 9:58 AM EDT
It's cross-strait.
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yalanand
7/5/2011 5:00 AM EDT
@peter,
Are you saying silicon-germanium manufacturing is not possible in Taiwanese fabs ?
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peter.clarke
6/21/2011 10:13 AM EDT
Several Chinese fabless chip companies use TSMC so I think the decision is more about technology than politics.
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bmws88
6/21/2011 11:17 AM EDT
SiGe BiCMOS. Other choice is IBM?
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wilber_xbox
6/21/2011 1:31 PM EDT
true. We do not know the details of why they chose Tower in US rather than other companies in either US or Asia.
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resistion
6/21/2011 12:47 PM EDT
But tsmc also has 0.35 um bicmos with sige, is it that bad?
Cross-strait has ups and downs. Right now there is heavy attention on who is involved with China.
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HANKFAB68
6/21/2011 11:21 PM EDT
Wow, they could afford the cost by asking the wafer production in US.
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GREAT-Terry
6/24/2011 1:33 AM EDT
A walkie-talkie chipset! Company from Chongqing! These all makes me feel the part is designed for military use. It then make sense that the Chinese company give up the large IBM and cross-strait Taiwan.
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