Intellectual property
Renesas Technology has agreed to license Sarnoff's TakeCharge technology, which allows IC designers to create on-chip electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection circuitry.
The deal covers Renesas' silicon-on-insulator (SOI) products, including 90nm and 65nm devices. Renesas plans to supply optimised and compact SOI products offering strong ESD protection while reducing the amount of time required for design and development.
Renesas Technology has long used its own proprietary ESD protection technology in its bulk silicon CMOS products. However, as miniaturisation advances, the use of bulk silicon as a raw material is giving way to SOI, especially in the 65nm process.
Renesas is buying in Sarnoff's technology to accelerate development work on advanced system large-scale IC (LSI) devices. TakeCharge provides a high level of ESD protection in a smaller surface area, which allows the development of smaller chips. Finally, it has low parasitic capacitance, making it ideal for use in high-speed applications.
ESD can occur between the printed circuit board and LSI devices during the production process. Static electricity that has built up on the printed circuit board can be discharged when the LSI devices are mounted. This raises the danger that ESD will cause excessive current flow within the LSI device and destroy its internal elements. One way to prevent this is the use of special circuitry to protect the internal elements of the LSI device. In an SOI device the transistors are formed on top of an insulator. This makes such devices even more susceptible to damage from ESD and makes effective counter measures even more important. Sarnoff's European subsidiary develops and markets the ESD technology worldwide.
eMagin has received a notification of allowance for its US patent application No.09/957,221, "Method and system for stabilizing thin film transistors in active matrix OLED displays". The patent describes a method of creating electrically stable thin film transistors (TFTs) for OLED devices having small pixel sizes. The company believes this will facilitate the creation of lower cost microdisplays for many virtual imaging applications including electronic gaming, data processing and viewing movies. The approach is also potentially useful for creating very high-resolution large screen OLED displays.
In this invention, the control signals to each TFT gate include a data signal that is proportional to the desired luminance output for the OLED and a reverse data signal that is used to reverse bias the TFT to prevent threshold drift. The data signal alteration is performed either at a frame rate or at a line rate. The result is a large colour range and more stable control than previously available using TFTs. The company is seeking to work with partners interested in using this innovative technology to create low cost, large area OLED displays.
Power Integrations has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Fairchild Semiconductor International in the Delaware district court in the USA. The company is seeking damages as well as an injunction prohibiting Fairchild's sale of infringing power management integrated circuits. Fairchild responded by saying that it does not believe its products violate Power Integrations' patents and that the claims are baseless. The proprietary Fairchild Power Switch (FPS) product family spans end applications from cell phone chargers to colour televisions.
