CEA-Leti today announced the launch of its Silicon Impulse IC design competence center, a comprehensive IC technology platform offering IC design, advanced intellectual property, emulator and test services along with industrial multi-project wafer (MPW) shuttles.

Silicon Impulse provides immediate access to Leti’s and CEA-List’s advanced IC technologies and systems expertise. It also leverages Leti’s extensive experience in technology transfer. Collaboration between Leti and List experts and ecosystem partners aims to shorten time to market from idea to production. This process includes prototyping and pre-production runs utilizing Leti’s advanced industrial infrastructure from concept to production hand-off.

Silicon Impulse offers its partners the full range of Leti and List’s expertise in analog, RF, digital and memory design and hardware/software-integrated solutions at the technology node that most cost-effectively meets their needs. The IC competence center combines Leti’s large portfolio of leading-edge technologies and novel low-power design solutions with a unique service for speeding integration of Fully Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator (FD-SOI) and many other more advanced technologies (ReRAM, MEMS, 3DVLSI, Silicon Photonics), enabling heterogeneous low-power co-integration. These services are targeted to enable the rapidly emerging third-generation information-acquisition and processing devices that are key to the Internet of Things (IoT).

“Pervasive wireless networking and groundbreaking low-power technologies are critical to the widespread adoption of the Internet of Things, because they improve the performance of portable devices and their network infrastructure,” said Leti CEO Marie–Noëlle Semeria. “With Silicon Impulse’s one-stop-shop platform, 28nm FD-SOI heterogeneous, low-power design becomes a reality for the IoT community. Silicon Impulse helps Leti’s partners introduce innovative products that deliver optimal performance for these applications, and benefit from the most advanced technologies.”

Silicon Impulse, in cooperation with a rich network of ecosystem partners, is set up to develop, produce and integrate innovative customized or standard systems that exploit advanced technologies for all of Leti’s industrial partners.

Specific features of the offer include:

• Leti’s pool of expertise in advanced IC design and low-power technologies
• Leading-edge IC technologies for application-oriented device, circuit and system solutions
• Regularly scheduled MPW shuttles for silicon prototyping and small-volume runs
• An established high-tech supply chain to accelerate production ramp-up and hand-off
• Customized collaboration to fit partner needs

Leti’s experts will collaborate with partners from the feasibility-study stage through device design, prototyping, testing and production ramp up. The wide range of IC technologies available in the platform is further augmented by List’s comprehensive embedded software solutions.

Leti will showcase its new Silicon Impulse platform at major industry events this year: DATE, Silicon Impulse workshop during VLSI-DAT, DAC, LetiDays Grenoble, LetiDay San Francisco during SEMICON West, LetiDay Tokyo, Leti’s Devices Workshop at IEDM and SOI consortium events.