Globalfoundries offers automotive BCD

LONDON – Foundry chipmaker Globalfoundries Inc. has said it is preparing to offer a 0.18-micron bipolar-CMOS-DMOS process called BCDlite for use for automotive applications such as power management devices, audio amplifiers, displays and LED driver ICs.

Globalfoundries (Milpitas, Calif.) said it can provide device characterization, modeling, electrostatic discharge and physical design kit support for the BCD process. In addition one-time-programmable non-volatile memory is available as an option. The company did not explain why the process is described as "lite."

However, the process has passed the Automotive Electronic Council's AEC-Q100 Group D critical reliability test, Globalfoundries said. In addition, Globalfoundries has conducted its own quality and reliability assessments on the process solution to complement the industry standard. The AEC-Q100 qualified 0.18-micron BCDlite process will be offered to customers in Q4, 2011.

Globalfoundries said it is not new to automotive work and already serves six of the top 10 automotive semiconductor suppliers in the world and has achieved qualification with many automotive system manufacturers.

"Today's announcement further validates the comprehensive set of automotive-qualified processes we offer to the market," said Raj Kumar, senior vice president and general manager for Globalfoundries in Singapore.

According to market research company Semicast Research, the average semiconductor content per vehicle is expected to grow at CAGR 4.3 percent from 2008 to 2017 to reach approximately $425 per vehicle by 2017. The annual global automotive semiconductor market is forecast to grow from $20 billion in 2010 to $39 billion by 2017.


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