Category Archives: Packaging

Tech spending still going strongIT spending remained broadly strong throughout a difficult end to 2012, as business confidence waned in the shadow of the "fiscal cliff,” economic growth declined in much of Europe, and economies in Asia/Pacific struggled to cope with reduced exports, according to the latest International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Black Book. In spite of these headwinds, worldwide IT spending recorded annual growth of 5.9% in 2012 in constant currency terms, keeping pace with the 5.8% growth recorded in 2011. Total IT spending on hardware, software and IT services reached $2 trillion, while ICT spending (including telecom services) increased by 4.8% to $3.6 trillion.

Last year was difficult for U.S.-based IT suppliers, however, which were adversely affected by the strength of the dollar throughout most of the year. In U.S.-dollar terms, worldwide IT spending grew by just 3.3%. This marked a significant slowdown from the U.S. dollar growth rate of 9.5% recorded in 2011. In 2013, IT spending is expected to increase by 5.5% as businesses and consumers continue to invest in mobile devices, storage, networks, and software applications.

While overall IT spending remained stable, 2012 was another difficult year for the PC industry, which recorded a 2% decline in annual revenues. Revenue declines were also recorded in servers, PC monitors, and feature phones as cannibalization from tablets and smartphones continued to reshape the IT industry landscape. For the first time, spending on smartphones in 2012 exceeded PCs, reaching almost $300 billion, while PC spending declined to $233 billion.

"Cannibalization is happening across the industry," said Stephen Minton, Vice President in IDC’s Global Technology & Industry Research Organization. "Smartphones have taken over from feature phones, tablet adoption is impacting PC spending, and the Cloud is affecting the traditional software, services and infrastructure markets. IT spending is still growing organically, but not at the same pace as prior to the financial crisis. Businesses are adopting IT solutions such as virtualization, automation, and SaaS as a means to reduce the annual increases in their overall IT spending at a time when economic uncertainty remains high."

The global economy has been volatile through the past 12 months, and this sense of uncertainty persisted into the first quarter of 2013. IDC expects the U.S. economy to stabilize in the second half of the year, driving IT spending growth of 5.5%. 2013 will be another tough year for Europe, however, where tech spending is expected to increase by just 2% as the Eurozone and UK struggle to shrug off the lingering debt crisis. Excluding mobile devices, growth in Europe will be less than 1%. Japan has meanwhile lost most of the post-reconstruction momentum that drove IT spending to increase by 4% in 2012, and will record IT growth of 0% this year.

"This will be another tough year for mature economies," added Minton. "Weakness in Europe, as governments continue to impose austerity measures with a direct and indirect impact on IT spending, has also damaged the export-dependent Japanese economy. The U.S. should perform better, as long as politicians continue to reach 11th-hour deals to avert an economic crisis, and the PC market in the U.S. will at least stabilize after two successive years of major declines."

Emerging markets have also been volatile in the past 12 months, with weaker economic growth in Brazil, India, and China, creating uncertainty for IT vendors. Economic projections for 2013 are generally positive, however, and IDC believes that the government in China has enough ammunition to ensure an improvement in overall growth. With penetration rates still relatively low in many segments and industrial sectors within the BRICs and other key emerging markets, a stable economic outlook will translate into improving IT spending trends.

"We’re more confident about China than we were in the middle of 2012, when PC shipments were slowing and there was a sense that the economy had slowed down more quickly than the government had planned," said Minton. "Underlying IT demand remained strong, despite the volatile capital spending patterns that mainly affected PCs, and total IT spending in China still increased by 16% last year, which was only slightly down compared to 17% growth in 2011. We expect more of the same in 2013, even in spite of the inevitable slowdown in some emerging technology adoption rates as those markets gradually mature."

The competitive landscape of the cellphone core integrated circuit (IC) business has completely transformed over the past five years, with Qualcomm Inc. and Samsung capitalizing on the rise of smartphones and 4G.

In the market for application-specific mobile handset core ICs like baseband and radio-frequency semiconductors, Qualcomm in 2012 reigned supreme with 31 percent market revenue share, according to the IHS iSuppli Wireless Competitive Landscape Tool from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS).

The San Diego-based chip maker has held the top position since 2007 and even enlarged its lead by 8 percentage points during the period. South Korea’s Samsung Electronics was the No. 2 vendor after Qualcomm, with a 21 percent share, after not even ranking in in the Top 10 in 2007, as presented in the attached figure.

Together the two companies accounted for more than half of the total market, with the next eight vendors in the Top 10 accounting for another 34 percentage points of share. The other vendors among the leaders were, in descending order, MediaTek, Intel, Skyworks, Texas Instruments, ST-Ericsson, Renesas, Spreadtrum and Broadcom. The Top 10 enjoyed a collective 86 percent share of the market.

“As smartphones and the next-generation wireless standard known as 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) have gained popularity, the corresponding influences from both forces have created paradigm shifts that transformed competition in the mobile handset core IC market,” said Brad Shaffer, analyst for consumer & communications at IHS. “The arrival of Apple Inc.’s iPhone five years ago changed the game and paved the way for the current market rankings. This change is dramatically illustrated by looking at the major differences in the cellphone core IC rankings from 2007 to 2012. The companies that benefited from the shift in market orientation rose to domination while others that were caught between changing market environments were left in limbo.”

Getting to the core

The cellphone core IC space encompasses semiconductors that provide mobile handsets with wireless wide-area-networking (WWAN) communication and application-processing capabilities.

The market segments here include handset core ICs for analog baseband, digital baseband, power amplifiers, radio and intermediate frequencies, high-level operating systems and software processors, and other multimedia or graphics coprocessors.

Changes sweep the industry

Of the companies that did not even rank back in 2007, Samsung has climbed the quickest, landing in the runner-up spot, driven by its presence in the applications processor space. Also among those making the jump from outside the Top 10 is Intel, in fourth position at the end of last year after acquiring Infineon’s wireless division. It remains to be seen how successful Intel will be in utilizing the acquisition, finalized in 2011, in order to increase the breadth of its mobile product offering and increase the likelihood of winning design slots for those mobile products. Intel is also starting to see some signs of life with the Atom processor and its inclusion in handsets from Motorola along with other original equipment manufacturers.

Two other vendors also broke into the ranks of the Top 10 in 2012.

In ninth place, Spreadtrum expanded its digital baseband IC revenue by more than 370 percent within the five-year period. Broadcom likewise expanded revenue by a similar dizzying magnitude to land at No. 10—thanks to baseband IC revenue finally gaining traction by ramping design wins since 2011 at Samsung.

Everything’s smaller for Texas Instruments

While Qualcomm increased its lead at the top from 2007 to 2012, Texas Instruments fell from second to sixth place—down from a 20 percent share to 4 percent. TI’s proprietary OMAP product line of chips for portable and mobile multimedia applications has not taken off as quickly as expected, and the company as a result could not offset its planned exit from baseband products.

Another vendor near the top in 2007 that experienced a decrease in market share was ST-Ericsson, shrinking 2 percent to a 4 percent market share.

More changes ahead

The structure of the mobile handset core IC market will continue to shift, particularly as LTE becomes more widespread.

Baseband chips, already accounting for more than half the revenue of the total handset core IC space, will maintain their pre-eminence in determining the market-share gains and losses of industry vendors moving forward, IHS believes. Nonetheless, the future will also be driven by the ability of any given IC supplier to provide platform solutions that optimize the system-level design of all of the ICs, making up the handset’s core chip architecture.

Attribution: By gillyberlin (Flickr: Motorola Milestone Test) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Toshiba develops CMOS image sensorToshiba Corporation announced the development of a CMOS image sensor with a small area and low power pixel readout circuits. A sample sensor embedded with the readout circuits shows double the performance of a conventional one. Toshiba presented this development at ISSCC 2013 in San Francisco, CA on Feb. 20.

As demand for commodity mobile phones takes off in emerging markets, CMOS image sensor need to be smaller, consume less power and offer low noise performance. The pixel readout circuits of CMOS image sensors are largely noise reducing correlated double sampling (CDS) circuits, along with a programmable gain amplifier (PGA) and an analog to digital converter (ADC). Serial signal processing architecture is best suited for securing conventional CMOS image sensors with a small area and low power pixel readout circuits, because a PGA and ADC can be shared by many CDS circuits placed in each column area of the sensor. However, smaller size and lower power are still challenges, since noise reduction circuits occupy a large area in the readout circuits, and PGA and ADC have high power consumption.

Key key technologies to overcome these challenges:

1) Column CDS circuits primarily made up of aria-efficient PMOS capacitors. The area of the CDS circuits is reduced to about half that of conventional circuits.

2) In the readout circuits, a level shift function is simultaneously achieved by a capacitive coupling through the PMOS capacitors, allowing adjustment of the signal dynamic range between the column CDS circuits and the PGA and the ADC. This achieves low power and low voltage implementation of the PGA and ADC, reducing their power consumption by 40%.

3) Implementation of a low power switching procedure in the ADC suited to processing the pixel signals of CMOS image sensors. This reduces the switching power consumption of the ADC by 80%.

Toshiba has integrated the three technologies in a sample sensor and confirmed that they double the overall performance of the sensor core. The company now plans to apply CMOS image sensors with the readout circuits to low cost mobile phones and medical cameras in fiscal year 2013.

Silicon nanocrystals have a size of a few nanometers and possess a high luminous potential. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Toronto/Canada have now succeeded in manufacturing silicon-based light-emitting diodes (SiLEDs). They are free of heavy metals and can emit light in various colors.

Liquid-processed SiLEDs: By changing the size of the silicon nanocrystals, color of the light emitted can be varied. (Photo: F. Maier-Flaig, KIT/LTI)

Silicon dominates in microelectronics and photovoltaics industry, but has been considered unsuitable for light-emitting diodes for a long time. However, this is not true for nanoscopic dimensions: Minute silicon nanocrystals can produce light. These nanocrystals consist of a few hundred to thousand atoms and have a considerable potential as highly efficient light emitters, as was demonstrated by the team of Professor Uli Lemmer and Professor Annie K. Powell from KIT as well as Professor Geoffrey A. Ozin from the University of Toronto. In a joint project, the scientists have now succeeded in manufacturing highly efficient light-emitting diodes from the silicon nanocrystals.

So far, manufacture of silicon light-emitting diodes has been limited to the red visible spectral range and the near infrared.

“Controlled manufacture of diodes emitting multicolor light, however, is an absolutely novelty,” explains Florian Maier-Flaig, scientist of the Light Technology Institute (LTI) of KIT and doctoral student of the Karlsruhe School of Optics and Photonics (KSOP). KIT scientists specifically adjust the color of the light emitted by the diodes by separating nanoparticles depending on their size.

 “Moreover, our light-emitting diodes have a surprising long-term stability that has not been reached before,” Maier-Flaig reports.

The increased service life of the components in operation is due to the use of nanoparticles of one size only. This enhances the stability of the sensitive thin-film components. Short circuits due to oversized particles are excluded.

The development made by the researchers from Karlsruhe and Toronto is also characterized by an impressing homogeneity of the luminous areas. The KIT researchers are among the few teams in the world that know how to manufacture such devices.

“With the liquid-processed silicon LEDs that may potentially be produced on large areas as well as at low costs, the nanoparticle community enters new territory, the associated potentials of which can hardly be estimated today. But presumably, textbooks about semiconductor components have to be rewritten,” says Geoffrey A. Ozin, who is presently working as a KIT distinguished research fellow at KIT’s Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN).

The SiLEDs also have the advantage that they do not contain any heavy metals. In contrast to cadmium selenide, cadmium sulfide or lead sulfide used by other groups of researchers, the silicon used by this group for the light-emitting nanoparticles is not toxic. Moreover, it is available at low costs and highly abundant on earth. Due to their many advantages, the SiLEDs will be developed further in cooperation with other partners.

Toshiba Corporation today announced the development of an innovative low-power technology for embedded SRAM for application in smart phones and other mobile products. The new technology reduces active and standby power in temperatures ranging from room temperature (RT) to high temperature (HT) by using a bit line power calculator (BLPC) and a digitally controllable retention circuit (DCRC). A prototype has been confirmed to reduce active and standby power consumption at 25°C by 27% and 85%, respectively.

Toshiba presented this development at the 2013 International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, CA on February 20.

Longer battery life requires lower power consumption in both high performance and low performance modes (MP3 decoding, background processing, etc.). As low performance applications require only tens of MHz operation, SRAM temperature remains around RT, where active and leakage power consumptions are comparable. Given this, the key issue is to reduce active and standby power from HT to RT.

Toshiba’s new technology applies a BLPC and DCRC. The BLPC predicts power consumption of bit lines by using replicated bit lines to monitor the frequency of the ring oscillator. It minimizes the active power of the SRAM in certain conditions by monitoring the current consumption of the SRAM rest circuits. The DCRC greatly decreases standby power in the retention circuit by periodically activating itself to update the size of the buffer of the retention driver.

Toshiba will continue to develop technologies that contribute to high performance, low power system LSI for mobile products.

Only light, aerial oxygen, and a catalyst are needed to remove pollutants from water. Ruhr-Universitat Bochum researchers led by Professor Radim Beránek are collaborating with colleagues from seven different countries in order to develop a photocatalyst that is efficient enough to be profitable. For that purpose, they combine sunlight-absorbing semiconductors and nanostructured materials which they optimize for electron transfer processes. The aim is to implement the newly developed photocatalysts into a liquid paint with which photoreactors can easily be coated. The EU supports the project within its 7th Framework Programme (FP7) with 3.7 million Euro funding for three years.

Current problems of photocatalysis

People from many countries of the world extensively use pesticides, which contaminate drinking and irrigation water with toxic organic compounds. In rural areas of Vietnam, herbicides and dioxins, resistant to degradation, made their way into the water cycle during the Vietnam War. The results can be devastating. People who drink this contaminated water are at a higher risk of developing cancer, and pregnant women may put their newborn at risk for birth defects, in worst case scenarios.

“Photocatalysis is potentially one of the cheapest and most efficient methods for purifying water from pollutants,” Radim Beránek says.

Sunlight and oxygen establish oxidizing conditions, under which toxins are easily degraded into non-harmful substances like water and carbon dioxide. Up until now, the process, however, faces two problems: degradation rates are too low and assembly of the needed photoreactors is too expensive.

The aim: cheeper and more efficient catalysts

Within the project “4G-PHOTOCAT,” the researchers aim to develop cost-efficient photocatalysts with a considerably improved degradation rate. They fabricate innovative composite materials consisting of semiconductors and nanostructured metal oxides. In order to achieve the optimal architecture for the product, they employ advanced chemical deposition techniques with a high degree of control over composition and morphology.

“Our ultimate goal is to implement the newly developed photocatalysts into a liquid paint,” Radim Beránek says. “Photoreactors painted with that liquid can be used, for example, for water decontamination in remote rural areas of Vietnam.”

Collaborators

“4G-PHOTOCAT “allies the expertise of seven academic and three industrial partners from five European countries and two Southeast Asian countries. At the RUB, Beránek collaborates with Professor Dr. Roland A. Fischer (Inorganic Chemistry II), Professor Dr. Martin Muhler, and Dr. Jennifer Strunk (Industrial Chemistry). The international collaborators include scientists from the University College London, J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry in Prague, Jagiellonian University Krakow, University of Helsinki, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and Hanoi University of Agriculture. Furthermore, industrial partners from Finland (Picosun), Czech Republic (Advanced Materials), and Vietnam (Q&A) have joined the team.

The ability to improve silicon transistors is reaching its fundamental limit, so researchers are searching for new ways to keep making electronic devices faster and more powerful. University of Nebraska-Lincoln physicists and colleagues have taken a major step toward breaking that silicon barrier.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln physicists (from left) Evgeny Tsymbal, John D. Burton and Alexei Gruverman in the UNL Materials Research Science and Education Center’s Thin Film Growth and Characterization Facility. (Photo by Craig Chandler/University Communications)

UNL physicist Evgeny Tsymbal and colleagues demonstrated that a nanostructure with unique properties may hold the key to creating much smaller, more powerful electronics. They reported their findings in Nature Materials, published online this week. This work builds on predictions by Tsymbal, Bessey Professor of Physics and Astronomy and director of UNL’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and colleague John D. Burton, reported in Physical Review Letters in 2011.

They had theorized that a layer of ferroelectric oxide just a few atoms thick could be exploited as a memory element to store more digital information using less energy than silicon-based memories. Using quantum theories and super computers at the university’s Holland Computing Center, they predicted how a ferroelectric memory element would behave.

Then they asked experimentalist Qi Li at Pennsylvania State University, UNL physicist Alexei Gruverman and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tenn., and at universities in China and Korea to put their theories to the test. Those results proved the researchers’ predictions correct.

The theory is based, in part, on a phenomenon called quantum tunneling, in which particles can pass through a barrier only at the quantum, or atomic, level. To develop a new generation of electronics, scientists are experimenting with tunnel junctions, in which an ultra-thin barrier is placed between two electrodes. When voltage is applied, electrons are able to tunnel through the barrier, creating a current with resistance.

Tsymbal and colleagues created a tunnel junction using nano-thin ferroelectric oxide, a material with both positive and negative polarization directions, which can be reversed by switching the voltage charge. They have shown that reversing the polarization changes the resistance through the tunnel junction by 100 times, a difference large enough to easily measure.

These ferroelectric properties are important because its two polarization directions could be read across regions like a binary code to store information. Tsymbal’s team has shown that the measurable difference in resistance could be used to detect polarization directions.

Current silicon-based devices require large currents, so the size of the space between regions must be big enough to accommodate the heat that’s generated. Because a ferroelectric device would use less energy, it would allow for more regions in a much smaller space, which would enable more compact and powerful devices.

Such a device won’t hit stores anytime soon, however. The effect only works up to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

"For applications, you obviously want to have this change in resistance at room temperature," Tsymbal said. "This can’t be used immediately, but it shows some new directions to pursue."

Next, UNL’s team will investigate other geometric and material configurations to find alternatives with greater applicability. Gruverman and Tsymbal also are exploring something called memristor. Rather than abruptly reversing polarization between two directions, memristor would allow changing polarization, and therefore resistance, continuously.

"Changing in a continuous way offers many stages of resistance and that will allow us to see more interesting physics and applications," Tsymbal said.

Co-authors are: UNL’s Tysmbal, Burton and Gruverman; Li of Penn State; Y.W. Yin, Penn State and the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale at the University of Science and Technology of China; X.G. Li, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale at the University of Science and Technology of China; Y-M. Kim, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Seoul National University, Korea; A.Y. Borisevich and S.J. Pennycook, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and S.M. Yang and T.W. Noh, Seoul National University.

Grants from UNL’s National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and the NSF’s Nebraska Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research help support this research.

 

ultra-low power processorAt this week’s International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2013), imec and Holst Centre presented an ultra-low power processor that operates reliably at near-threshold voltages. The processor delivers clock speeds up to 1MHz at voltages down to 0.4 V. In tests based on a Fast Fourier Transform use case, it consumed only 79 µW – a fraction of the power consumption at standard voltages.

“Energy-efficient data processing will be vital for a wide range of emerging applications from Body Area Networks to building automation and equipment monitoring. Reducing active power consumption and standby leakage are thus increasingly important considerations for digital design,” said Harmke de Groot, Program Director at Holst Centre/imec. “Yet much of the industry’s research is still aimed at improving performance rather than increasing battery lifetime by higher energy efficiency.  At Holst Centre, we focus on low power and low voltage to enable battery-powered and energy scavenging smart devices.”

The new energy-efficient processor platform is customized for biomedical applications such as ECG and EEG monitoring. This was realized by creating an interface architecture around a general-purpose processor core to enable ultra-low voltage operation and automatic scaling of performance to improve energy efficiency, plus in-situ monitoring to guarantee reliability and high yield.

One of the key developments was the ability to reduce the operating voltage while delivering enough performance to meet application needs, and maintaining that performance over a range of operating voltages and temperatures. That was achieved by forward biasing the transistors within the processor, allowing it to operate at voltages just above the threshold for the CMOS process used.  The operating voltage can be adjusted between the processor’s nominal voltage of 1.1 V and a minimum voltage of 0.4 V depending on the current performance requirements.

Natural variations in manufacturing processes can lead to voltage fluctuations when a processor is being used. At near-threshold voltages, these fluctuations can be enough to stop the processer working. To avoid this and ensure reliability, the team connected “canary flip-flops” to the most timing-critical parts of the processor. These are designed to fail before the processor’s circuits do and can be monitored – allowing the operating voltage to be scaled up before noise affects the processor. In addition, automatic bias control eliminates the usual voltage drop across the power switches that control the processor, further enhancing energy efficiency and reliability under near-threshold conditions.

To reduce energy consumption even further, the interface can control the state of individual components on the chip separately, for example turning off the processor core or reducing the voltage in the memory when these components are not required. The software interface can also dynamically switch the processor between various performance modes, optimizing the number of active functional units in the core to suit the algorithm being performed. Unused functional units are switched off to reduce power consumption.

ion gunThe Hiden IG20 high-brightness gas ion gun is further enhanced by the introduction of a new beam optic and ion source configuration to enable both increased beam brightness and beam contrast, together with a significant reduction in ultimate spot size.

With a raster scanning area of 4x4mm, the IG20 is equally suited to depth profiling and to surface imaging applications and is the preferred gas ion gun for secondary ion and secondary neutral mass spectrometry, for Auger and for XPS. Parameter selection and gun operation are fully under PC control, and the gun is operable with both oxygen and with inert gas primary sources.

Two interchangeable ion sources are available for operation with the same beam optic configuration. One is optimized for general analysis with maximum brightness and a beam current of 800nA; one is optimized for high dynamic range depth profiling applications with minimised beam scatter and supporting a beam current of 200nA within a beam diameter of just 80 micron.

The IG20 ion gun is differentially pumped and includes full raster scanning, incorporation of a neutrals dump, DN-35-CF (2.75 inch diameter) Conflat-type mounting flange and simple replacement of the ion source yttria-coated iridium twin-filament. Companion products include the IG-5C metal ion gun with caesium source and a choice of quadrupole SIMS detectors.

Leti to coordinate European supply chain in silicon photonicsCEA-Leti today announced that it will coordinate a four-year project aimed at building a European-based supply chain in silicon photonics and speeding industrialization of the technology.

The PLAT4M (Photonic Libraries And Technology for Manufacturing) project will focus on bringing the existing silicon photonics research platform to a level that enables seamless transition to industry, suitable for different application fields and levels of production volume.

PLAT4M, which is funded by a European Commission grant of 10.2 million euros, includes 15 leading European research and development institutes and CMOS companies, key industrial and research organizations in design and packaging, as well as end users in different application fields to build the complete supply chain.

“Silicon with its mature integration platform has brought electronic circuits to mass-market applications – our vision is that silicon photonics will follow this evolution,” said Laurent Fulbert, Integrated Photonics Program Manager at CEA-Leti, coordinator of PLAT4M. “Upgrading existing platforms to become compatible with industrialization is now essential and this requires streamlining and stabilizing the design and process flows by taking into account design robustness, process variability and integration constraints. The PLAT4M partners bring a combination of expertise to the challenge of building a complete supply chain for commercializing silicon photonics in Europe.”

A surge in output of silicon photonics research in recent years has significantly boosted the potential for commercial exploitation of the technology. However, most of this R&D has been devoted to developing elementary building blocks, rather than fabricating complete photonic integrated circuits, which are needed to support large potential markets.

 The PLAT4M consortium will make technologies and tools mature by building a coherent design flow, demonstrating manufacturability of elementary devices and process integration and developing a packaging toolkit. The project will validate the complete supply chain through application-driven test vehicles representing various application fields, such as telecom and datacom, gas sensing and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and vibrometry. It also will focus on preparing the next-generation platform by setting up a roadmap for performance evolution and assessing scalability to high-volume production.

The supply chain will be based on technology platforms of Leti, imec and STMicroelectronics, supported by a unified design environment.

 The multiple benefits of PLAT4M for the European photonic industry will include:

  • Preparing the supply chain for silicon photonics technology, from chip-level technology to packaged circuits
  • Making integration technologies accessible to a broad circle of users in a fabless model
  • Contributing to the development of a design environment that facilitates photonics/electronics convergence
  • Moving the emphasis from the component to the architecture, and thus concentrate efforts on new products or new functionalities rather than the technology level
  • Aggregating competencies in photonics/electronics design and fabrication, and
  • Retaining the key added value in components in Europe through optoelectronic integration, with little added value in offshore assembly

PLAT4M Consortium Members

The consortium consists of technology providers, research institutes, end users and SMEs with excellent track records in advanced photonics technologies. At the design and process level, CEA and imec have been the most prominent European players in silicon photonics for a decade. Together with University of Paris-Sud, III-V Lab and TNO, they have demonstrated numerous scientific and technological breakthroughs.

For building a complete design flow, Mentor Graphics, PhoeniX BV and Si2 are world leaders in EDA tools and will work together to develop a common reference platform.

STMicroelectronics (France and Italy) brings its experience in microelectronics, and it has been engaged for the past year in the development of silicon photonics at the industrial level. Tyndall-UCC and Aifotec are renowned experts in the field of optoelectronic packaging and will work together on the implementation of packaging technologies developed within PLAT4M in a manufacturing environment.

End-users like Polytec, Thales Research & Technology and NXP will drive the demonstrators development and assess the use of silicon photonics in their applications fields.