Sarnoff Europe Expands ESD Services with Low Threshold Consulting and TLP/HBM Testing

GISTEL, Belgium -- Dec 03, 2008 -- Sarnoff Europe ( www.sarnoffeurope.com) today announced complementary low threshold consulting and testing services to its TakeCharge(R) silicon IP-based Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) portfolio licensing.

The new consulting service leverages Sarnoff Europe's experience in providing silicon and product proven ESD solutions over 8 consecutive CMOS generations (0.5um down to 40nm) in multiple foundries. A team of 14 engineers uses advanced, proprietary tools to achieve quick turnaround for customer ESD risk assessment, design and layout review, debugging, ESD rules and guidelines, GDSII cells, IO/IC integration, calculation, and optimization.

Sarnoff Europe and client engineers work closely together throughout the design cycle to ensure successful ESD protection of the product under study. The resulting full chip solution typically consists of a combination of public- and customer's in-house developed solutions and foundry supplied guidelines, complemented upon necessity by Sarnoff proprietary ESD solutions.

"The comprehensive and detailed work-through of the ESD strategy and the physical ESD triggering mechanisms have surpassed our expectations. Sarnoff's ESD support has helped increase our confidence to exceed our customer's specialized requirements," said Erik Fossum Faerevaag, Analog Manager, Energy Micro AS of Norway.

Sarnoff Europe's ESD testing service provides both standard and customized ESD measurements. Expert testing engineers use Sarnoff Europe's state of the art, in-house ESD test laboratory which includes a DC parametric analyzer, TLP, HBM and MM test equipment as well as VF-TLP and customized pulse setups. Analysis can be performed on bare dies and/or packaged silicon samples, as needed.

"The Sarnoff Europe test service provided us with the measurement data to convince our customer of the IC ESD performance. Moreover, the discussions and results are extremely useful in our target for optimizing ESD behavior of our next product family," said Olivier Miallet, Product Engineering Manager, Inside Contactless of France.

Sarnoff Europe provides ESD solutions that are complementary to the public, foundry or partner-owned solutions. Typically Sarnoff Europe's solutions focus on high ESD performance (e.g. 8kV) for harsh IC environments, advanced low capacitive (fF) clamps for high speed SerDes or RF applications and low leakage (nA) approaches for mobile or green applications. These silicon IP solutions are available for various process nodes and foundries under the TakeCharge brand name.

Sarnoff's ESD design solutions are product proven in more than 500 commercially released IC's in nano, standard and high voltage (HV) CMOS, BiCMOS and Bipolar CMOS DMOS (BCD) processes.

Sarnoff's TakeCharge product proven ESD protection is licensed for a broad spectrum of applications such as ASIC's, FPGA's, LCD drivers, power, consumer and communications IC's. TakeCharge licensees include leading IDM, fabless and foundry IC producers worldwide, including Toshiba, Altera, Infineon, ST, Ricoh, OKI, Sony, Fujitsu, Renesas, Matsushita, Seiko Epson, NJR, PMC-Sierra, ON, AMIS, RedMere, Nanotech, Gennum, Actel, CamSemi, THine, Inphi, Tower and others.

About Sarnoff Corporation

Sarnoff Corporation ( www.sarnoff.com) delivers vision, video and semiconductor technology innovations that empower government and commercial clients to see/sense, understand and control complex environments. Founded in 1942 as RCA Laboratories, Sarnoff makes continuous breakthroughs in real-time video processing for defense, security and surveillance; ICs, lasers, imaging and sensing devices; end-to-end video solutions. Sarnoff is a subsidiary of SRI International.

About Sarnoff Europe

Sarnoff Europe bvba ( www.sarnoffeurope.com) headquartered in Gistel, Belgium, is a subsidiary company of Sarnoff Corporation. Sarnoff Europe assumes worldwide responsibility for the development and commercialization of Sarnoff's Takecharge(R) on-chip ESD protection IP.