Jan. 9, 2003 – Auburn, CA – A team of engineers formerly with IBM Microelectronics’ wireless division have formed a new radio and analog IC design company, Tahoe RF Semiconductor Inc.

Tahoe RF provides frontend circuit design and simulation all the way to backend layout, DRC/LVS, post-layout simulation, and fully packaged fabrication management using Cadence software, the new company said.

“This team has worked together over six years with repeated first silicon success,” noted Irshad Rasheed, Tahoe RF president. “Now we are pleased to continue as a team to provide customer-specific analog and RFIC chipsets, designs and IP to customers.”

“Forming Tahoe RF Semiconductor allows us to use our analog and RFIC experience in the same team setting that led the way at IBM,” stated Christopher Saint, VP of engineering and the author of two IC layout books. “As IBM reassessed its needs for in-house wireless design expertise, our primary focus was to keep this team together.”

The Tahoe RF Semiconductor team has designed, laid out, and fabricated many products, including an entire WCDMA wireless chipset with analog baseband filters, 2GHz direct down conversion receiver, dual transmit/receive WCDMA PLL/synthesizers, IF VGA circuits, RF VGA circuits, pseudo direct upconvert transmit chip, 2GHz quadrature generation and 4GHz VCO. Other recent projects include a JCDMA transmit/receive chipset with integrated frequency synthesizers, CMOS and ECL standard cell libraries, 8GHz RF divide by 4 and dual modulus dividers, and CDMA2000 IF downconverter.