Advanced SiGe BiCMOS Chip Technology
Brian Dance, Contributing Editor -- Semiconductor International, 6/1/2002
Alcatel (Paris) is offering customers of
Europractice IC Service worldwide access to its new high-speed 350 nm SiGe1
BiCMOS technology for prototyping and volume production at its fabs in Belgium.
This technology is ideal for rf products operating at up to 10 GHz. IMEC (Leuven, Belgium), which coordinates the Europractice program, will offer a total solution including cell library distribution and support, deep-submicron layout generation, low-cost prototyping and the production of tested and packaged chips. Customers for the Alcatel technology are typically R&D groups or companies with small-volume requirements.
"Alcatel's 350 nm SiGe1 BiCMOS technology complements the deep-submicron CMOS technologies that IMEC offers as part of the Europractice IC Service portfolio," said Carl Das, director of Europractice IC service at IMEC. "IMEC can now offer access to low-cost prototyping and volume production for a wide range of future rf products to IC designers throughout the world."
"With Ft/Fmax of 50/80 GHz at BVCEO above 3.6 V, our SiGe1 technology is doubling rf performance, and this at virtually the same cost of a comparable Si BiCMOS technology," added Marnix Tack, director of technology R&D of Alcatel's microelectronics activities. "Our 350 nm SiGe technology comes with a dense and very rich telecom library. It can be used for a broad range of applications such as WLAN and optical networks, where good rf performance at low cost is required. By offering SiGe1 to IMEC-Europractice, this rf technology becomes available to a wide range of customers who can rely on professional service from the Europractice organization, and on the established foundry capabilities of Alcatel."
Europractice IC Service, established in 1995 by the European Commission to encourage European industry and universities to use advanced IC technologies, offers IC design, prototyping and small- and medium-volume production. Each year, about 500 designs are prototyped and 130 small-volume projects are manufactured at leading IC manufacturers.
IMEC-Europractice and Alcatel have been working together to offer Alcatel's mixed-mode and high-voltage technologies to the Europractice community. The present agreement now extends the collaboration into the area of rf technologies.
For more details, visit www.europractice.imec.be.
For additional information on materials science, go to www.semiconductor.net/materials
