Design and fab combine to speed RF to market

Atheros Communications has selected Tower to produce its latest RF on standard digital CMOS, wireless LAN 802.11g chip.

Atheros Communications has selected Tower to produce its latest RF on standard digital CMOS, wireless LAN 802.11g chip.

The device is now ramping production in Tower's 0.18um, RF on standard digital CMOS technology at its advanced Fab2, thanks to the optimisation of the design cycle by Tower's design services.

The rapidly growing wireless LAN semiconductor market in which Atheros competes is estimated to be over $1.7 billion in 2006 and $3 billion in 2009.

Atheros used Tower's design services to implement the product's physical design, thereby expediting the chip's time to market.

This highly integrated netlist-to-GDS design project required Tower to put together the physical design of the complete chip while integrating complex proprietary circuits from Atheros.

This product is the latest addition among other Atheros products already in volume production at Tower.

"Tower's design services, as applied to this project, proved invaluable", said Rick Bahr, Vice President of Engineering at Atheros Communications.

"The design team demonstrated strong engineering and communication skills which helped reduce the design cycle of this complex chip".

"I look forward to future projects with Tower".

"We were delighted by this opportunity to help our customer shorten their product's time to market", said Yaakov Milstain, Vice President and General Manager of Design Services at Tower Semiconductor.

"Our design team rose to the challenge of implementing the physical design of this advanced RF on standard digital CMOS chip".

"Using Tower's silicon proven design flow, we were able to achieve working silicon at first pass while meeting our customer's expectations".

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