Sarnoff Europe Releases Silicon-proven ESD Solutions for Advanced Applications in 40nm CMOS

GISTEL, Belgium--  September 29, 2008 -- Sarnoff Europe today announced that it has expanded its TakeCharge® Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) IP portfolio with silicon-proven solutions for the TSMC 40nm G process technology.

Targeted and suitable for the specific design challenges of advanced consumer applications in 40nm, the silicon-proven ESD solutions feature extremely low power consumption (50pA leakage), enable high signal speeds (100fF linear ESD load) and provide high ESD performance for external pins (8kV HDMI).

“Together with the base foundry rules, our specialized complimentary ESD solutions enable product reliability and manufacturing yield for the leading edge applications in the world’s most advanced foundry process,” said Koen Verhaege, Executive Director of Sarnoff Europe. “This defines one of our key roles in the IP eco-system: reducing time-to-market and optimizing customer profit by mitigating the risk, expenses and delays of ESD re-design. This is especially so for the advanced applications such as wireless ultra-wide band, multi-media, mobile, network, game and FPGA applications.”

The Sarnoff proprietary 40nm CMOS ESD solutions are fully qualified for 2,000V Human Body Model (HBM), 200V Machine Model (MM), and solid (500V) Charged Device Model (CDM) robustness even for the most demanding applications. The solutions are available today. A GDSII library of clamps can be delivered off-the-shelf, or tailored to customer specifications. A complete TakeCharge Design Kit will be available for IO developers and IP integrators for SOC-NOC designs by October 31, 2008.

Sarnoff Europe strives to have silicon-proven ESD solutions available very early in the life cycle of each new leading process. As such, IC innovators can avoid the ESD hurdles and focus entirely on their individual design challenges and novel applications. More than 450 volume production ICs to date testify to the quality and versatility of the advanced ESD solutions provided by Sarnoff Europe.

About Sarnoff Europe

Sarnoff Europe headquartered in Gistel, Belgium, is a subsidiary company of Sarnoff Corporation – founded in 1942 as the RCA Laboratories. Sarnoff Europe assumes worldwide responsibility for the development and commercialization of Sarnoff’s TakeCharge® on-chip ESD protection IP.