New Industry Products

MagnaChip Offers High Voltage Options for Second Gen. 0.13-micron Embedded Flash Process

May 31, 2019 by Scott McMahan

MagnaChip Semiconductor Corporation announced the offering of its second generation 0.13 micron eFlash (Embedded Flash) technology with 20V and 30V high-voltage options. The company designed the technology to address the needs for multi-function hybrid mixed-signal products such as wireless power charger ICs, touch ICs, and fingerprint readout ICs.

With the increasing complexity of analog and mixed-signal functions, IC designers are facing growing challenges to integrating multiple functions in a single product. MagnaChip gives the example of wireless power charger ICs, that include digital logic, analog blocks, power management functions, embedded microcontrollers, etc. In order to design and fabricate such multi-functional products, hybrid processes that can integrate various devices have become highly desirable.

For this reason, MagnaChip has added 20V and 30V high-voltage options to its second generation 0.13 micron eFlash to its foundry service offering. According to MagnaChip, this unique, cost-competitive hybrid process reduced 7 process steps in comparison to the first generation 0.13 micron eFlash.

It also provides various customized IPs up to 64Kbytes. Even with the addition of the high-voltage option, the hybrid process preserves the original eFlash characteristics.

An additional benefit of this process is that customers can now select either 20V or 30V, whichever fits their products' characteristics while having the option to select IPs such as SRAM, PLL analog IPs, high-density standard cell libraries and high voltage IO libraries to meet their design needs. Furthermore, the hybrid process offers fully isolated, high-voltage capability for the output driver to handle negative voltage, thereby enhancing design flexibility.

MagnaChip's newly developed hybrid process leverages the high-voltage devices of which reliability has already been verified in DDI (Display Driver IC) technology and can help minimize high-voltage area in chips through more optimized design rules and enhanced current performance.

This high-voltage capability is particularly important for products needing high-voltage output drivers and those requiring high SNR (signal to noise ratio). For instance, touch ICs in tablets and notebooks mostly use 20V and monitors use 30V.

MagnaChip's next version of the hybrid embedded eFlash process is already under development to extend the voltage capability to 40V.

Another type of hybrid process, e-Flash with 40V BCD (Bipolar CMOS DMOS), has been widely accepted in the market. MagnaChip is also developing e-Flash with 120V BCD process. These technologies have the potential for a broad range of applications such as motor driver ICs, BLU driver ICs, wireless power chargers, and USB type-C PDs.

"The second generation 0.13 micron eFlash with high-voltage technology is highly desirable for products requiring both memory and high-voltage, such as wireless power charger ICs, large panel touch ICs and fingerprint ICs," said YJ Kim, CEO of MagnaChip, "MagnaChip will continue to develop new hybrid technologies to enable our customers to design various products and to stay competitive in the market."