News Article
Dongbu Electronics and Cadence jointly develop process design kit
Dongbu Electronics announced that it has collaborated with Cadence Design Systems, Inc. to develop a high-voltage BCDMOS (Bipolar, CMOS, DMOS) Process Design Kit (PDK) to facilitate the processing of 60V chip designs at the 0.35-micron node.
Such chips are ideally suited for a broad range of high-voltage and power-management applications in automobiles, computer peripherals, and communications products. According to Dr. Jae Song, EVP of Marketing Department for Dongbu, "We're very pleased with our latest, jointly developed PDK, and are confident that it will enable fabless companies developing high-voltage chips to sharply reduce both product design costs and time-to-volume production." He noted that Dongbu selected Cadence as a PDK development partner about two years ago, at which time both companies began developing a PDK to speed the design of analogue functions for CMOS mixed-signal chips."Providing Dongbu Electronics with quality PDKs for our current Virtuoso platform offering provides significant value to our common customers," said Jan Willis, senior vice president, Industry Alliances, at Cadence. "We are pleased to play such a key role in the growing collaboration with Dongbu Electronics."Much like the earlier PDKs jointly developed by the two companies, the new high-voltage BCDMOS version contains simulation, layout, and verification structures needed to streamline chip design, and is wholly optimized for Dongbu's wafer fab processing equipment and flows. Dongbu expects to continue collaborating with Cadence to develop PDKs for future high-voltage processes. "Our technologists are now developing processes to implement 85V BCDMOS and 5V analogue semiconductor functions," said Dr. Song.Among the world-class foundries, Dongbu continues to distinguish itself as a provider of "specialty-process solutions" for chips targeting high-growth markets. The Korean foundry's new high-voltage PDK, for example, supports BDCMOS chips destined to serve an expanding range of high-voltage products coming to market. By some estimates, the market for high-voltage semiconductors will exceed US$36 billion in 2007, up from approximately US$23 billion in 2004. Currently European companies are the leading high-voltage semiconductor manufacturers with 39-percent market share, followed by the United States with 24-percent share and Japan with 22-percent share.While most Korean companies currently import high-voltage semiconductors to manufacture their products, Dongbu aims to play a key role in establishing a reliable environment for manufacturing high-voltage BCDMOS chips within Korea. "We aim to further enhance our country's well-established semiconductor-manufacturing infrastructure," said Dr. Song. "Providing PDKs for specialty processes such as high-voltage BCDMOS is but one indication of our ongoing commitment to reach this goal."
