TSMC, SVTC tie up to boost chip design

PORTLAND: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd (TSMC) and the San Jose based-SVTC Technologies have joined hands to form an Innovation Incubation Alliance aimed at accelerating the introduction of new chip design and manufacturing.

According to Joseph Bronson, CEO of SVTC Technologies, the alliance will prompt startup companies who come up with new ideas to make use of SVTC with regard to incubation of their technologies and then take it beyond that toward volume production at TSMC.

An EETimes report on this alliance said that the joining hands of the two semiconductor majors will help in concentrating more on ‘More that Moore’ applications and will not depend on scaling.

It has been pointed out that the new Innovation Incubation Alliance takes off from an earlier collaboration that had been designed to trigger new ideas in chip design and manufacturing. Earlier this month, TSMC and the Belgium-based Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre had entered into a similar alliance.

SVTC, which boasts of both 8 and 12-inch process development capabilities, will look at partnering TSMC to co-market the services emerging from the Innovation Incubation Alliance.

It may be recalled here that SVTC had effected a merger with Sematech's Advanced Technology Development Facility in 2007, in an attempt to help fabless chip companies with the development of intellectual property for mixed-signal applications, including MEMS, memory, novel transistor materials, logic, biotechnology, image sensors and photo voltaics, the report added.