TAIPEI, Taiwan — Pure-play gallium arsenide foundry WIN Semiconductors Corp. struck an alliance Monday with Roke Manor Research, a Siemens subsidiary in England specializing in RFIC and MMIC design.
Though few details of the deal were released, it appears that Roke will optimize its customer designs for manufacturing at WIN. "This alliance will provide our customers with the one-stop shop ability to achieve custom MMIC solutions, quickly, efficiently and with an optimum cost result — especially for high volume, fast time-to-market, commercial wireless products," said Roger Hopper, principal skill group leader of the GaAs IC group at Roke Manor Research.
"By leveraging our pHEMT receiver and HBT power amplifier design experience, with WIN's fast-turnaround, six-inch wafer processing capabilities we are confident that we can provide the best design solution for our customers," he said.
In the two years since it began, Taiwan's WIN has built a library of process technologies that applies to applications from 800 MHz to 100 GHz, including HBT, pHEMT, pHEMT Switch and mHEMT.
The company also said Monday that it was releasing a process design kit for the Agilent Technologies EEsof Advanced Design Systems simulation environment. The WPP15 kit is aimed at WIN's 0.15-micron power pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (PHEMT) process that is in volume production.
The design kit includes scalable models for PHEMT cells and passive components fabricated with WIN's advanced six-inch GaAs wafer process. The kit incorporates a menu-driven cell library that includes transistor models covering a range of gate periphery, the company said. A scaling rule embedded in the models fosters high accuracy that is confirmed through power load-pull measurements up to millimeter-wave frequencies, the company said. The kit and relevant library cells and models are free for WIN's foundry users.
