NORWOOD, USA & HSINCHU, TAIWAN: Analog Devices Inc. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd have announced a significant accomplishment in their longstanding relationship. With the application of TSMC's 65nm process technology to ADI's SoftFone baseband processors, designs will benefit from lower cost and better power efficiency —important considerations for advanced multimedia applications in wireless handsets.

"Analog Devices and TSMC have been collaborating for 18 years. Today, a wide range of our products — analog, DSP, radio frequency (RF) and mixed signal — are manufactured by TSMC," said Christian Kermarrec, vice president, RF and wireless systems. "TSMC's continued leadership in advanced technology, such as 65nm, has been instrumental in our SoftFone and general purpose DSP roadmaps, helping ADI to achieve continuously improved cost, power consumption and performance."

"First time silicon success of Analog Devices' baseband product on TSMC's 65nm process is a testament to our long and strong partnership. The deep and broad collaboration between the two companies starts from the initial design to tape-out to working silicon," added Kenneth Kin, senior vice president of worldwide sales and service for TSMC. "The confluence of ADI's excellent designs and TSMC's robust technologies has resulted in a gamut of successful new product introductions in the past, and will continue to provide assurance of future silicon success."

TSMC 65nm process
TSMC's 65nm technology is the company's third-generation semiconductor process employing copper interconnects and low-k dielectrics. It is a nine-layer metal process with core voltages of 1V or 1.2V, and I/O voltages of 1.8V, 2.5V or 3.3V. The technology supports a standard cell gate density twice that of TSMC's 90nm process. It also features the very competitive 6T-SRAM and 1T embedded DRAM memory cell sizes. In addition, this technology offering includes mixed signal and RF functionality to support analog and wireless design, embedded high density memory to support integration of logic and memory, and electrical fuse to support customer encryption needs.
 
TSMC is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, providing the industry's leading process technology and the foundry industry's largest portfolio of process-proven libraries, IP, design tools and reference flows. Its total managed capacity in 2006 exceeded seven million (eight-inch equivalent) wafers, including capacity from two advanced 12-inch GigaFabs, four eight-inch fabs, one six-inch fab, as well as TSMC's wholly owned subsidiaries, WaferTech and TSMC (Shanghai), and its joint venture fab, SSMC. TSMC is the first foundry to provide 65-nm production capabilities.

Acknowledged industry-wide as the world leader in data conversion and signal conditioning technology, Analog Devices serves over 60,000 customers, representing virtually all types of electronic equipment. It is a leading global manufacturer of high-performance integrated circuits used in analog and digital signal processing applications.