Tower Semiconductor Licenses 20kV HBM ESD Protection from Sarnoff
Sarnoff Europe and Tower Semiconductor announced that Tower Semiconductor has licensed Sarnoff Europe’s TakeCharge® electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection IP portfolio. Tower Semiconductor will use TakeCharge for its customer’s analog and mixed-signal applications requiring high-performance low-capacitance ESD protection of up to 20kV HBM.
"Sarnoff’s TakeCharge architecture enables pushing technology to its physical limits. It is aimed at providing ultra-high, best-in-class, ESD protection while maintaining small circuit footprint. Product applications that could benefit the most from this family of ESD solutions include, among other, high-frequency interface ICs, such as Analog Switches, minigates and multigates.
Working closely with Tower Semiconductor, Sarnoff Europe will develop optimized TakeCharge Design Kits (TDK), semi-automated tool sets containing a library of scalable ESD design solutions. These TDK’s will be licensed to Tower’s customers, enabling the non-ESD-expert to efficiently implement ESD protection, and attain first time success, fast time to market in each of their integrated circuit (IC) designs.
"As a specialty foundry, it is important that we provide our fabless customers with a wide range of robust and efficient high-performance ESD protection solutions for all their logic and mixed-signal applications," said Dani Ashkenazi, General Manager CMOS Product Line at Tower Semiconductor. "Sarnoff Europe has consistently been a reliable and expert ESD protection IP partner to the semiconductor industry, making them the natural choice as our partner for these demanding applications."
"We are pleased that Tower Semiconductor selected Sarnoff Europe to provide a high-quality ESD protection platform," said Koen Verhaege, Executive Director of Sarnoff Europe. "Sarnoff Europe TakeCharge ESD protection solutions are developed with scalability in mind, and thus can meet high-performance requirements, even up to 20kV HBM."
