VeriSilicon Announces Ultra Low Power BLE 5.0 RF IP Based on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 22FDX FD-SOI Process for IoT Applications

SHANGHAI -- November 1, 2018 -- VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. (VeriSilicon) today announced its Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.0 RF IP based on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 22FDX® FD-SOI process. On the strength of VeriSilicon’s innovative RF architecture and by leveraging GF’s 22FDX technology, the new product achieves significant improvements in power, area, and cost compared to current offerings, it will better serve the emerging and increasing wearable devices and IoT applications.

VeriSilicon BLE 5.0 RF IP includes a transceiver which is compliant with the BLE 5.0 specification and supports GFSK modulation and demodulation. The silicon measurement shows that the sensitivity can be tested up to -98dBm with less than 7mW power dissipation in typical conditions. It largely improves battery life for low power IoT applications. In addition, the RF transceiver saves 40% area compared to a similar implementation on 55nm bulk CMOS. Besides the RF transceiver, this IP integrates on-chip balun, TX/RX switch and 32K RC OSC driver to save the BOM. Moreover, high efficiency DC/DC and LDOs are also available for power management.

An SoC with VeriSilicon BLE 5.0 RF IP will be fabricated using GF’s 22FDX process with cost-effective scaling and power reduction for IoT applications. 22FDX enables efficient single-chip integration of RF, transceiver, baseband, processor, and power management components.

“Wearable and IoT markets especially the wireless earplug market are growing rapidly, and it will surge through consumer use, hearing aids, personal care and other industrial applications,” said Dr. Wayne Dai, Founder, Chairman, President and CEO of VeriSilicon. “By taking advantage of integrated RF capabilities of FD-SOI, in particular GF’s 22FDX, our BLE 5.0 RF IP will significantly reduce the system cost and greatly boost the growth momentum of wearable products such as wireless earplugs.”

“VeriSilicon’s BLE IP complements GF’s 22FDX FD-SOI capabilities and is well positioned to support the explosive growth of low-power IoT and connected devices,” said Mark Ireland, vice president of ecosystem partnerships at GF. “Together, we broaden our IP and services to further enable our mutual clients to provide power and cost efficient solutions.”

About VeriSilicon

VeriSilicon is a Silicon Platform as a Service (SiPaaS^®) company that provides industry-leading, comprehensive System-on-a-Chip (SoC) and System-in-a-Package (SiP) solutions for a wide range of end markets including mobile internet devices, datacenters, the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI of Things (AIoT), automotive, industrial, and medical electronics. Our machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies are well positioned to address the movement to “intelligent” devices. SiPaaS provides our customers a substantial head start in the semiconductor design and development process and allows the customers to focus their efforts on core competency with differentiating features. Our end-to-end semiconductor turnkey services can take a design from concept to a completed, tested, and packaged semiconductor chip in record time. The breadth and flexibility of our SiPaaS solutions make them a performance-effective and cost-efficient choice for a variety of customers.

Founded in 2001 and head-quartered in Shanghai, China, VeriSilicon has over 700 employees with five R&D centers and nine sales offices worldwide.