TowerJazz, the global specialty foundry leader, announced today that it has qualified Migdal HaEmek (Fab 2) capacity for RF SOI switch and bulk CMOS controller process platforms to augment its existing factory in Newport Beach, CA and support the growing demand for RF front-end modules.
The move has more than doubled the company’s total wafer capacity for these technologies while providing flexible dual sourcing capability to its customers. To date, over 30 products have been taped out to Migdal HaEmek and initial wafer production has begun. The product pipeline remains strong and is now feeding both of these factories. The R&D effort has also been expanded with an R&D team established at each site to take advantage of local talent accelerating the roadmap and ensuring TowerJazz continues to provide its customers a technology advantage in addition to increased supply flexibility.
TowerJazz’s SOI technology (CS18) offers industry leading insertion loss, isolation and harmonics necessary to support current and future generations of RF products. CS18 together with its CMOS controller technology (CA18) also offer enabling features such as dense digital libraries, MIM capacitors, inductors, multiple resistors, eFuse, and best in class process design kits (PDKs) to ensure first-time success.
Mobile Experts, a market research firm for mobile communications, forecasts the RF front-end component market size to reach $8.9 billion in 2014, rising rapidly to over $13 billion in 2018. Rapid proliferation of smartphones along with increasing RF data paths per phone is primarily driving this exceptional market growth. TowerJazz’s high performance RFCMOS (both bulk and SOI) and SiGe BiCMOS technologies are ideally suited to benefit from this global trend.
“Seemingly insatiable demand for RF silicon content in smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled devices is fueling the demand for our RF technologies and we are excited to meet this growing demand by opening an additional factory to this product line,” said Dr. Marco Racanelli, Sr. VP & GM of TowerJazz’s RF/High Performance Analog Business Group. “We continue to invest heavily in R&D efforts. Having established a second RF R&D team in Migdal HaEmek allows us to provide leap frog technology platforms in accelerated time lines. The qualification of an additional site for wafer production has not only doubled our manufacturing capacity, but also added regional diversity for customer assurance and business continuity planning. Two site development and manufacturing also enables quick and seamless production ramp of the locally developed platforms.”