Key Foundry reinforces automotive eFuse IP solutions

SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 28, 2021 – Key Foundry, the only pure-play foundry in Korea, announced today that it will begin the offering of automotive eFuse IP solutions that operate even at 150℃. The company has provided fabless designers with eFuse IP for automotive applications that support device operation at temperatures up to 125℃ and eFuse IP for consumer applications such as MCUs, smart sensors, chargers and motor drivers, and through the offering of the eFuse IP solutions operatable at 150℃, it will continue expanding its portfolio for automotive semiconductors.

EFuse IP is a non-volatile memory that retains data regardless of power supply. It is differentiated from SRAM or DRAM whose stored data is lost when power is off. Dissimilar to a typical fuse that completely breaks memory cells like a power fuse box, eFuse IP retains data by changing the resistance without shutting off the entire memory cells. Efuse IP uses memory cells in the range from single digit bits to several thousand bits. It is crucial for eFuse IP to achieve high reliability and also to keep resistance fluctuations low in order to enable foundry customers to secure sufficient design or process margins.

Semiconductor products with the same design may have differences in characteristics among chips due to the fabrication process. Fabless designers adopt eFuse IP solutions to trim these deviations, and they conduct procedures to correct the deviations in chip characteristics upon the completion of fabrication processing. Through the steps described above, customers may maintain the consistency in characteristics among chips and improve the yield rate.

Key Foundry’s eFuse IP solutions can be applied to all of its processes from 0.11 to 0.18 micron without adding any additional process step, and many of the customers are already using the solutions in their development or mass-production of MCUs, motor driver ICs, PMICs (Power Management Integrated Circuits), AC-DC/ DC-DC converters, LED driver ICs, etc. In particular, as embedding an NVM in a PMIC is a recent trend, the use of eFuse IP by Key Foundry’s customers is growing.

In addition to having its eFuse IP qualified for Grade-1 under the automotive reliability standard AEC-Q100, Key Foundry has been successful in securing data comparable to the standard of AEC-Q100 Grade-0 which guarantees device operation at a temperature up to 150℃. Meanwhile, the company has recently released eFuse IP smaller in size up to 40% than the previous version, and is supporting customers’ product-specific requirements by expanding conditions for operating voltage and temperature of eFuse IP. Furthermore, the foundry is currently preparing to improve eFuse IP by reducing its programming time through parallel programming and reducing interface pins to two by introducing a serical interface. In addition, it is developing a new eFuse IP to realize another 40% size reduction with a plan to offer it to customers in the second half of next year.

“We are providing customers with a plethora of different IP solutions to accommodate effortless product designs and we are also continuing to put our efforts in developing new IP solutions to enable our customers to achieve high-performance and cost-effective semiconductor designs,” said Dr. Tae Jong Lee, CEO of Key Foundry. “The eFuse IP is one of the most demanding solutions from our customers, and through the expansion of solutions suitable for automotive applications, we expect that we will be able to provide more customers with customized foundry services.”

About Key Foundry
Headquartered in Korea, Key Foundry provides specialty Analog and Mixed-Signal foundry services for semiconductor companies to serve a wide range of applications in the consumer, communications, computing, automotive and industrial industries. With a broad range of technology portfolio and process nodes, Key Foundry has the flexibility and capability to meet the ever-evolving needs of semiconductor companies across the globe. Please visit https://www.key-foundry.com for more information.

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