SMIC ropes in Virage, Kilopass

SHANGHAI, CHINA: China-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) has kicked off measures to rope in joint efforts with two non-volatile memory IP providers for future applications and process nodes.

The two companies SMIC would work with would be Fremont-based Virage Logic Corp and Santa Clara-based Kilopass Technology Inc – both US entities.

Significantly, with the plans well on track, the company is moving to 65 and 45 nm process nodes.

According to an industry news sources, the China major has picked the Aeon reprogrammable non-volatile memory from Virage for use in RFID applications. In the meantime, the company is said to have decided to continue working with Kilopass on embedded one-time-programmable (OTP) memory.

It is a known fact that SMIC and Kilopass have been collaborating since 2005 with the development of 180, 130, and 90-nm OTP memory.

Meanwhile, Virage and SMIC have together come out with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) optimized version of Virage's Aeon MTP NVM solution, capable of use in passive tags. This is being developed on SMIC's 180-nm low-leakage (LL) process.

Based on a single-poly standard logic CMOS process, the Aeon RFID memory avoids additional manufacturing steps normally involved with floating-gate memory, the source added. The Kilopass XPM technology, in the meantime, is built using standard CMOS logic.