Intellectual property
Japan's Ricoh has licensed Sarnoff Europe's TakeCharge technology, which allows integrated circuit (IC) designers to create on-chip electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection circuitry. This enables robust specification performance on first implementation, shortening time to market by eliminating costly, time-consuming redesigns. Initially Ricoh will use TakeCharge for product applications in its analogue CMOS family of processes. The technology has been customised to Ricoh's requirements. TakeCharge has been silicon proven in advanced processes down to 65nm CMOS including silicon on insulator (SOI). Toshiba, Sony, OKI, JRC, Hynix, Infineon, Altera, PMC-Sierra, and Scintera have previously taken up licenses to the technology. Sarnoff's Europe subsidiary, based in Belgium, has world wide responsibility for the development and commercialisation of TakeCharge.
Nanochip is to license use of Ovonyx' thin-film nonvolatile semiconductor memory technology. The agreement permits Nanochip to use Ovonyx memory technology on a royalty-bearing basis in its micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) based, ultra-high density data storage systems. Ovonyx memory technology uses a reversible phase-change memory process that has been previously commercialised in rewritable CD and DVD optical memory disks. The Ovonyx array-addressed semiconductor memory technology can potentially be used in stand-alone applications, such as Flash and DRAM replacements, as well as in embedded applications for microcontrollers and reconfigurable MOS logic. In probe-based storage systems, the reversible phase change data storage technology can permit the fabrication of robust, low-cost mass storage systems with bit densities of 1Terabit/in2.