Tower Semi licenses DSP Group core for new foundry fab in Israel

Tower Semi licenses DSP Group core for new foundry fab in Israel
By Semiconductor Business News
January 3, 2002 (10:21 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020102S0047

MIGDAL HAEMEK, Israel -- Silicon foundry supplier Tower Semiconductor Ltd. here announced it has licensed digital signal processor technology from DSP Group Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., to address new chip applications in cellular phones, multimedia systems, digital cameras, and speech/audio products.

Tower said it plans to offer the DSP technology in its new Fab 2, which is being built adjacent to the company's existing chip plant in Migdal Haemek. The licensing pact allows Tower to produce DSP Group's Teak cores in the new wafer fab.

"This agreement significantly expands our semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) offering in Fab 2," said Ishai Nachumovsky, senior director of foundry technologies at Tower. "Customers for our state-of-the-art 0.18 micron industry standard process technology will be provided with a fully ported, silicon-validated Teak core."

The Teak DSP core is a 16-bit fixed-point digital signal processor core based on a dual MAC (multiply/accumulate) architecture for peak performance of 420 million instructions per second (MIPS), according to the DSP Group. The core has a parallel instruction capability and it has been designed to perform high-speed interrupts and fast context switching, the Santa Clara company said.

Terms of the DSP licensing agreement were not released.