During a press conference on Monday, May 18, Renesas Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) announced joint plans to develop an embedded MCU platform based on flash, licensable to other semiconductor suppliers worldwide. The platform integrates Renesas' 40-nanometer embedded flash technology, a.k.a. eFlash, with TSMC's CMOS logic and analog IPs, EETimes reports.
Shinichi Iwamoto, Renesas Electronics' senior vice president, said the details of the licensing model and business arrangements in the joint venture are "still under discussion." The two companies plan to complete the new platform by the end of this year, added Iwamoto. Neither of the two companies' representatives commented on reports of TMSC's pending acquisition of Renesas' Tsuruoka fab in Yamagata. Cheng-Ming Lin, TSMC's director of specialty technology, said, however, that Monday's announcement was "the first step toward further collaboration between TSMC and Renesas."
While Renesas had previously expressed its commitment to Japan-based manufacturing of its "core products" such as automotive MCUs, now the company seems more willing to adopt an "outsourcing" model, which included MCUs for automotive applications. Renesas had previously agreed to outsource MCUs to TSMC using the 90-nanometer eFlash technology, but that was based on "a straightforward outsourcing model," said Iwamoto.
Under that model, "TSMC simply builds our eFlash based on Renesas' 90-nm spec, which [TSMC] would not be able to release to its own customers." The new 90-nanometer agreement, however, will enable TSMC to use Renesas' embedded flash technology on its own 40-nanometer process. TSMC will also be able to release it to its customers across the world.
Access to Renesas' MONOS (Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon) embedded flash technology will enable TSMC to considerably bolster its IT portfolio. "This is particularly attractive to us," Lin said, further adding that Monday's announcement marks TSMC's transition from Microchip's licensable 90-nm SuperFlash technology to embedded memory cell IPs with Renesas' 40-nm eFlash.
Renesas announced last year what it claimed to be the "industry's first" 40-nanometer embedded flash memory IP for automotive real-time applications. At the time, the company planned to be the first to launch 40-nm embedded flash CPUs for automotive applications. The samples were set to be made available by the beginning of fall 2012.
According to Renesas, its 40-nanometer flash memory IP guarantees as much as 20 years of data retention, and can be read from up to 170 degrees Celsius. Moreover, the code flash reportedly supports 120MHz read speed.
