Grace, eMemory Announced Volume Production of Cost Effective OTP Solution for MCU Application

Shanghai, China -- March 3, 2011 - Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (Grace), one of the leading semiconductor foundries in differentiated technologies, announced the volume production of its 0.18µm CE (cost-effective) OTP process. This process integrates eMemory’s green OTP, which sets an industry record as the smallest OTP cell, into Grace’s 0.18µm node with a low mask count.

Following the successful development of 0.18µm CE OTP process with Grace’s strategic partner eMemory in 2009, volume production at Grace has grown to more than 20 products with several thousand wafers per month. The customized OTP cell from eMemory is only 0.8µm2, which is 6x smaller than current standard 0.35µm OTP cell. This record-setting OTP cell achieves excellent data retention performance, which has been well proven by several MCU products. Compared to the standard 0.35µm OTP process, this tailored 0.18µm CE OTP process uses STI instead of LOCOS and 0.18µm design rules in the backend process so that the chip size can be reduced by more than 30%. On the other hand, this solution allows reduction of at least five mask layers, which means there are only 14 mask layers in total. In addition, a series of Silicon-proven OTP IPs and a full-set library can help customers dramatically improve time-to-market.

"CE OTP demonstrates eMemory's terrific technology development capabilities, and also shows our commitment to offering innovative solutions that reduce our customers’ production costs. We have been cooperating with Grace on NVM development for many years. Grace has demonstrated their capability of manufacturing high reliability NVM with green process. We will continue to work closely with Grace and dedicate ourselves to delivering leading-edge solutions to satisfy the needs of a wide range of applications," said Charles Hsu, Chairman of eMemory.

Furthermore, Grace and eMemory are continuing their ground-breaking NVM collaboration. For example, the logic-compatible, cost effective MTP under development provides more field program flexibility compared to OTP technology.

“We have targeted MCU platforms as one of the most important strategies in Grace’s differentiated technologies portfolio. Since 2009 thousands of MCU wafers have been shipped demonstrating Grace's volume production capabilities.” said Dr. Peter Weigand, Senior Vice President, Sales, Marketing and Services at Grace. “In order to expand the MCU solution platform, we continue to develop additional leading edge MCU offerings, such as the 0.18µm CE MTP, integrating eMemory technology into a logic compatible process.”