Take your partners: universities find alternate ways to tackle ASIC development costs - Business & Finance - application-specific integrated circuits

Electronic News, July 22, 2002 by Harry Yeates

ASICs are expensive and getting evermore so. Mask sets for some sub-0.13-micron processes are breaking the $1 million mark, which for most designers makes small-volume production or even prototyping prohibitively pricey. For universities under severe budget restrictions, any development work at all on the latest processes is becoming difficult.

Fortunately there are ways to tackle costs, such as buying only the wafer space you need on a square millimeter basis. Small-scale work from a number of different users can be collected together on a multiproject wafer (MPW), spreading the mask costs across all those involved.

Using an MPW can save a company 75 percent of the nonrecurring engineering costs (NREs) involved in developing an ASIC, said Al Morrison, VP of foundry operations at AMI Semiconductor. AMI is partnered with the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (Mosis), which acts as an intermediary between foundries and the MPW customers.

"What Mosis does is consolidate people's databases," Morrison said. "They manipulate the data such that they produce one set of retides, and go to the fab, run that material, bring it back and then ship out to each individual customer their specific amount of silicon." AMI is one of seven foundries whose processes Mosis offers.

In Europe the four-partner Europractice set-up offers a similar service, but is not a centralized organization. IMEC in Belgium is the technology partner, with Fraunhofer ILS in Germany as the interface to the austriamicrosystems (AMS) foundry, and VLSI ASA in Norway providing IP expertise. The Danish design house Delta provides production know-how, aimed in particular at industry.

With a wide range of processes on offer--generally determined by demand from larger customers--Europractice users don't just benefit from lower costs. Without MPW, many simply wouldn't have the chance to develop new technologies on the latest processes, gaining experience before larger-scale implementations.

There are, inevitably, downsides to MPW--the most salient being the time it takes to get your components back.

Despite the university projects that accounted for around two-thirds of Europractice business last year, it is the industrial customers who pay the bills for its partners.

Gert Jorgensen, sales and marketing manager at Delta, is aware that the huge costs now involved at the smaller geometries are making life difficult for the universities, and the issue has clearly occupied minds among the partners. "The problem with the universities is we have to find a way for them to be able to develop 0.18 micron, 0.13 micron," Jorgensen said. "The mask set costs are not getting cheaper, and the budgets at the universities are net getting higher. That's true everywhere in Europe."

Jorgensen suggests Europractice might eventually split to accommodate both academia and the industry customers, who are, after all, the ones coming back more or less regularly with higher-volume requests. "We are trying to find a method. We don't have a business model now, but it is certainly discussed between the four partners."

Harry Yeates is an editor for Electronics Weekly, a sister publication of Electronic News.