Tekmos 900th Design

As with most semiconductor companies, Tekmos uses an internal number to identify designs. Since we frequently merge multiple designs onto a single layout, we use another number for the layout. And since we may use multiple layouts on a multi-project wafer (MPW), we use a third set on numbers for mask sets.

This past month we completed our 900th design. As with many of our designs, this 900th design was a reverse engineering of an obsolete part. In this case, the part was a specialty memory consisting of a RAM with a shadow EEPROM that would store and recall the RAM contents with a single write or read. In addition to a small amount of digital logic, this circuit also included a band-gap voltage reference, an internal oscillator with PVT (Process-Voltage-Temperature) control, and multiple high voltage charge pumps. We used an older 0.6u process to obtain 5 volt operation.

The next question is, when will we reach our 1000th design? That is hard to forecast, but with the recent starting of a set of 7 obsolete 5 volt flash memories and two different obsolete microprocessors, we are about 10% of the way to the next milestone.

Date

2020-08-19