June 2, 2011 – Business Wire — X-FAB Silicon Foundries released ready-to-use design IP blocks for MEMS accelerometers, as part of its MEMS foundry service offerings. The IP blocks can be used in gyroscopes and accelerometers spec’d up to 100 G-force, shortening NPI and HVM ramp.

MicroMountains Applications and HSG-IMIT (Institute for Microtechnology and Information Technology of Hahn-Schickard-Gesellschaft) helped develop the IP blocks, which can be used in MEMS capacitive accelerometer designs covering 2, 10, and 100G ranges for motion sensing in gaming systems and toys, automotive crash-detection, and more.

The fully characterized blocks run on X-FAB’s advanced open platform inertial sensor process. Development included finite element analysis (FEA) simulation on sensor elements to measure sensitivity, shock-resistance and frequency behavior. After MEMS were manufactured with X-FAB’s inertial sensor process platform, HSG-IMIT characterized the accelerometers using different rate-tables for 3-axis-simulation, temperature and vacuum; shakers; and temperature chambers.

X-FAB’s goal is to shorten accelerometer and gyroscope design times with ready-to-use IP design blocks, accelerating new product introduction (NPI) and volume ramp. One product = one process currently dominates MEMS design and manufacturing, said Iain Rutherford, business line manager for MEMS at X-FAB. Rutherford says the drop-in as-is design blocks can help push the MEMS industry to better development times on more complex MEMS devices.

X-FAB is an analog/mixed-signal foundry group manufacturing silicon wafers for analog-digital ICs (mixed-signal ICs). For more information, visit www.xfab.com

Also read:

• Imec, Coventor interface on IC and MEMS design and manufacturing
• Introduction to MEMS gyroscopes by STMicroelectronics

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