Tekmos Talks
A Newsletter for the Semiconductor Industry August 2012 |
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| Greetings! | 
Welcome to Tekmos Talks August, and one of the hottest months of the year. Many industries are looking for electronics that operate in extreme environments including high temperatures such as in deep hole drilling and jet aircraft. It is only appropriate to announce this month Tekmos' achievement of an ultra high temperature ASIC.Tekmos Talks will also share news on product schedules, an article on extreme environment technologies, and highlight a manufacturing representative.
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From the Desk of Lynn Reed, President of Tekmos
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High Temperature ASICs
Tekmos shipped our first 250C ASIC in July. It was made using the X-FAB 1.0u SOI process. I would like to discuss some of the things we learned from our first ASIC.
To begin with, while the first ASIC was designed to work at 3.3 volts, the process is better suited for 5 volt operation. The nominal transistor thresholds are high, and that causes severe performance degradation at 3.3 volts. We were able to make the design work, but there are enough issues with working at 250C without adding voltage problems.
We used a gate array technology to implement the design. Gate array technologies are based on a routing grid; the smaller the grid, the higher the gate density, and the lower the cost. Sometimes, you can make a tradeoff between a tighter grid, and the possibility that DRC errors will be introduced by the router. Fixing a handful of DRC errors is no big deal, so an extra hour of development time is a good tradeoff against perhaps a 5% reduction in cost. But in our initial pass with the SOI technology, we made a tradeoff that resulted in thousands of errors, and took about a week to correct. We plan to relax our grid on our next chip.
The design of the SOI transistor makes it impossible to route over it using metal 1. This is because of the substrate contacts we have to include in the source of each transistor. We compensated for that by including poly tunnels in our basic transistor design, and by providing additional room for the metal 1 routing in cells. This made our basic gate array "block" larger, and we did not increase the transistor sizes accordingly. As a result, the ratio of routing capacitance to gate capacitance rose, and we were forced to do a lot more post-route load fixing, that hurts performance, which was doubly painful considering the reduced performance with the lower operating voltage. With our larger grid, we will also make wider transistors.
We still have some characterization to do on the results, and I'll talk about that later.
Call or email Bob Abrams, VP of Sales & Business Development for new product & data info. 512-342-9873 sales@tekmos.com
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Extreme Environment Technologies for Space and Terrestrial Applications
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by Tibor S. Balint*, James A. Cutts, Elizabeth A. Kolawa, and
Craig E. Peterson
Over the next decades, NASA's planned solar system exploration missions are targeting planets, moons and small bodies, where spacecraft would be expected to encounter diverse extreme environmental (EE) conditions throughout their mission phases. These EE conditions are often coupled. For instance, near the surface of Venus and in the deep atmospheres of giant planets, probes would experience high temperatures and pressures. In the Jovian system low temperatures are coupled with high radiation. Other environments include thermal cycling, and corrosion. Mission operations could also introduce extreme conditions, due to atmospheric entry heat flux and deceleration. Some of these EE conditions are not unique to space missions; they can be encountered by terrestrial assets from the fields of defense, oil and gas, aerospace, and automotive industries. In this paper we outline the findings of NASA's Extreme Environments Study Team, including discussions on state of the art and emerging capabilities related to environmental protection, tolerance and operations in EEs. We will also highlight cross cutting EE mitigation technologies, for example, between high g-load tolerant impactors for Europa and instrumented projectiles on Earth; high temperature electronics sensors on Jupiter deep probes and sensors inside jet engines; and pressure vessel technologies for Venus probes and sea bottom monitors. We will argue that synergistic development programs between these fields could be highly beneficial and cost effective for the various agencies and industries. Some of these environments, however, are specific to space and thus the related technology developments should be spearheaded by NASA with collaboration from industry and academia. Read more..
The pdf url for the full article can be accessed by the title and authors above or via the link noted.
Page 10 has an excellent diagram of commercial and military applications.
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Tekmos Manufacturing Representative Highlight
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Tekmos is pleased to have Active Sales Associates as a manufacturing representative.
Active Sales Associates provides highest quality solutions for applications in the fields of oil and gas exploration, oilfield services, industrial instrumentation, medical applications and contract manufacturing. We seek to understand our customer's expectations prior to committing our best in the industry support. Once committed, we focus on successful implementation of those expectations. Our goal is to gain preferred supplier status and create demand for the products offered by the manufacturers we represent.
Active Sales Associates offices are located in Houston, Texas, home to the world's premier oil and gas energy exploration and production companies. Oil business electronic applications are characterized by requirements for reliable operation at extremely high temperature in harsh environments over a specified length of time. Board level systems developed by these companies twenty five years ago are still satisfying current applications and plans are to continue using the technology as long as they can economically procure the parts. Our customer's ability to extend the life of designs enhances profitability by avoiding the high cost of redesign and retraining of users in the field. Manufacturing efficiencies gained over time also contribute to improved profitability. The down side to extended design life is lack of availability and soaring prices of aging semiconductor components. Eventually the OEM is faced with a life time buy decision and eventual costly redesign.
We recently completed a High temp ASIC program for a high reliability oilfield application. This was a success because of years of experience with designing ASICs and the technical knowledge of the fab processes from the engineering personnel at Tekmos. Because of Tekmos' excellent work, we have been presented with a new high temp processor opportunity.
Thanks to Tekmos, Active Sale Associates continues to be successful at providing our customers with sustainable, customized semiconductor solutions replacing unavailable, high price, aging semiconductor devices.
Tekmos is a fab-u-less semiconductor company.
Active Sales Associates
www.activetx.com
To learn more....
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Thank you for reading Tekmos Talks. Contact Bob Abrams, Vice President of Sales & Business Development, call (512) 342-9871 or email Sales for more information on our most recent "tape outs", our high temperature ASIC, or our other products.
We appreciate our customers. Tekmos is looking back while innovating for tomorrow.
Sincerely, |
Lynn Reed, President Tekmos4120 Commercial Center Drive, Suite 400Austin, TX 78744Phone: (512) 342-9871Fax: (512) 342-9873Email: Sales@Tekmos.com
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