Tekmos History Part 2

2011 – Sendai Earthquake

Tekmos had reverse engineered the 6805 and 6811 CPU cores, and was offering a few processors as replacements for obsolete Freescale / Motorola parts. Freescale had already decided to End-of-Life most of the processors in these product lines. All of these parts were made by a Freescale fab located in Sendai, Japan. On March 11th, 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake struck Sendai, and destroyed the Freescale fab. In response, Tekmos developed a special gate array that contained EEPROM and an 8-bit ADC. We used that array to produce a large number of different clones of the Freescale processors. This included the 6805 B, C, J and L series, and the 6811 A, D, E, F, K, KA, and KS series. We also made a replacement for the 68020 processor.

2013 – The Fracking Boom, and Bust

The fracking boom greatly increased the demand for high temperature circuits. Back in the days of vertical oil drilling, there was minimal demand for downhole electronics. Fracking, with the horizontal drilling, changed that, as electronics were required to steer the drilling bit. Horizontal drilling also can require drilling through extra hot zones to reach relatively lower temperature areas that contain oil. In response to this demand, Tekmos developed an ASIC technology based on a SOI process that operates up to 300ºC. We also pushed some of our processors made on bulk silicon up to the 175-200ºC range.

Fracking was very successful, and returned America back into the world’s largest oil producer. Unfortunately, that caused a glut of oil, which has greatly reduced the demand for high temperature electronics. Boom and bust is a characteristic of the oil market.

2017 – Rebuilding the Military

For a number of years, the US military budget did not support maintenance, and as a result, required replacement parts were obtained from other airplanes. After 8 years, a large number of military aircrafts were grounded for a lack of parts. That changed in 2017, and the military was again able to buy replacement parts. However, in those 8 years, a number of parts have become obsolete, and were no longer available. Tekmos received a number of contracts for the replacement of some of these obsolete parts. These contracts also caused Tekmos to develop a full military lot qualification capability.

2018 – Into Consumer Products

Tekmos had an opportunity to replace a consumer product ASIC whose supply chain had been disrupted. In order to achieve sub $0.50 pricing, Tekmos made technical advancements in a number of areas. We advanced to using a 180 nm technology to cut the die costs. We started using QFN packages to minimize the assembly costs. And we have invested in new testers, multi site testing handlers and advanced tape and reel equipment to cut back-end costs. This has left us well positioned for this market.

2020 – Covid-19

We now find ourselves in the midst of a new crisis, and it is not clear how this will develop. With each crisis, there is opportunity. We believe that this crisis will result in demand of more diverse and robust supply chains, which will increase the opportunity for second sourced ASICs. And we plan to play a role in that.

Date

2020-04-01