New ams Foundry Ecosystem provides solutions for ASIC design service, testing and fabrication

ams (SIX: AMS), a leading worldwide supplier of high per-formance sensor solutions, today announced at the CDNLive EMEA a further expansion of its Foundry Ecosystem. In cooperation with Fraunhofer IIS and RoodMicrotec, these three partners now open an additional reliable and comprehensive path towards ASIC solutions by offering IC development, assembly, test and qualification services to OEMs, system integrators and innova-tive start-ups.
Without any doubt ASICs have several advantages compared to discrete solutions, as they allow for optimized performance and size, help to reduce system costs, and secure a stable and reliable long-term supply of key components. Beyond that, ASICs establish a competitive advantage by protecting key IP and system knowhow in a very powerful way. However, despite these ad-vantages, the development and deployment of ASICs seems often out of reach for OEMs, system integrators and start-ups, who lack internal chip design capabilities. ams’ Foundry Ecosystem significantly lowers the entry barrier for these companies.

The ASIC design will be realized by ams’ long-term partner Fraunhofer IIS, based on their proven design experience, technology and application specific know-how. Specialty analog and sensor wafer manufacturing technologies supporting Industrial, Automotive and Medical applications will be provided by ams. Assembly and test services including test software and hardware develop-ment can be provided by ams as well as RoodMicrotec, who offers in addition comprehensive product qualification and failure analysis services. As a consequence, customers can delegate the management of the entire supply chain of their proprietary ASIC to ams and its Foundry Ecosys-tem partners by ordering known good dies with minimized production lead times and optimized cash flow.
“We will bring our long-term design experience into this new partnership, and customers will benefit also from a large number of IP blocks developed in ams´ technologies such as A/D-converters, 3D-Hall sensors and ISM-band wake-up receivers, just to name a few”, said Dr. Norbert Weber, Head of Integrated Circuits and Systems at Fraunhofer IIS.

With its core competency in the area of semiconductor backend services since more than 45 years, RoodMicrotec owns the expertise and equipment to industrialize and produce ASICs including test development as well as qualification according to all international standards like e.g. AEC-Q100 for devices to be used for automotive. For handling of field failures, RoodMicrotec offers a compre-hensive RMA process, entirely transparent for the customer. A full blown failure- and technology analysis lab provides all state-of-the-art non-destructive and destructive physical analysis methods to rapidly detect the root cause of the defect and to suggest countermeasures in an 8D report.

“To accelerate the product introduction while meeting highest quality requirements, we propose the use of the latest methodologies like ‘safe launch’ and ‘robustness validation’, where the application environment and a system anamnesis already influence the test- and qualification development”, says Martin Sallenhag, CEO at RoodMicrotec.

ams’ Foundry Ecosystem drives innovation and provides solutions for the most challenging appli-cations in sensor, MEMS and power management systems across all markets and regions. Fur-thermore it provides easy access to PDKs, IP blocks, consulting and qualification services, design support, design services, turnkey solutions and many more, provided by ams as well as by its ecosystem partners.

“With our partners Fraunhofer IIS and RoodMicrotec, competitive ASIC solutions are accessible to customers of all sizes, even though they may not have launched any ASIC yet”, says Markus Wuchse, General Manager for the Full Service Foundry division at ams. ”Interested customers are very welcome to get more detailed information about our reliable and comprehensive path towards ASIC solutions at a joint event on October 24, 2017 at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen.”