Product Development and Company News 2012

The year 2012 was a good one for Tekmos.  After the 2011 Sendai Earthquake, Tekmos obtained the rights to the Freescale 68XX microcontrollers.  This year saw us bring these parts into production.  We have made the B, C and J versions of the 68HC05 and the A, D, E, K, and KA versions of the 68HC11 family.  Each family contains memory variations with ROM, without ROM, and with Flash.  Our 80C186/188 EB series went into volume production, and our 89C668 microcontroller hit new production highs.  And while we are not done yet, we are nearing the end of our recreation of the 68020 microprocessor.

We brought out our first 250C ASICs, using a high temperature SOI process.  Rated at 250C, the circuit performed well at 305C during an engineering test.  We can now claim to make the hottest ASIC in the world.  We are developing these high temperature products to serve the oil and aviation markets.

We also developed a 10 volt (+/- 5V) process and used that to make a specialty ASIC that is used to drive microwave diodes.  And by understanding the application, we were able to make our outputs more efficient.  This reduced the power dissipation in our chip, and may allow us to eliminate a heat sink in the final design.

We have done multiple reliability studies on the new microprocessors, and are working down list producing AEC-Q100 qualification data.  We're not done yet, but so far, so good.

Our R&D is close to releasing a new approach to deep sub-micron ASICs.  These ASICs have traditionally had expensive NREs that require large volumes to be cost effective.  We are developing an approach that will reduce the NRE costs by an order of magnitude.  And this will increase the market by allowing lower volumes to be cost effective.  We will start off at 180nm, but will ultimately offer this approach down to the 65 nm node.

And we've grown.  Our headcount is up 25%, and we have expanded our manufacturing capacity with the addition of a new 320 pin tester, new bake and reliability study ovens, lead scan capability, and a temperature forcing probe for high temperature testing.

We can't wait until 2013.

Date

2012-12-31