American Semiconductor Earns Major Supplier Award

Santa Clara, CA - A Simucad foundry partner, American Semiconductor (ASI), has received the Supplier of the Year award in the Technology category from The Boeing Company at an awards ceremony held in San Diego April 17th.

ASI offers manufacturing options for advanced semiconductor technologies. They have been working closely with Silvaco and Simucad since their inception utilizing the ATHENA process simulator and the ATLAS device simulator in the development of their advanced FlexfeT SOI CMOS technology. This partnership was further cemented in 2005 when ASI and Silvaco teamed together to address the lack of affordable advanced semiconductor manufacturing options available in the USA.

"The combination of ASI's technology portfolio and Simucad's analog-mixed signal EDA tool flow was an excellent match that quickly drew interest from the U.S. Government and the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico," said Mark Maurer of Simucad and Silvaco's Government Business Division. "The program that emerged from this concept is called Systematic Hierarchical Approach for Radiation Hardened Electronics (SHARE). With visionary support from Congressmen Mike Simpson and Senator Larry Craig, we were able to secure federal funding to further develop the ASI technology and pair that capability with Process Design Kits (PDKs) from Simucad to give a broad base of designers access to this advanced technology."

This offering of advanced process technology with high quality affordable tools is particularly important for military and aerospace electronics which have unique performance requirements for functioning in harsh environments. The FlexFet technology has been identified as having inherent reliability benefits for these applications. Simucad's radiation-aware design and modeling environment allows military users to quickly and accurately characterize the radiation performance of their designs for space systems.

"The support we received from American Semiconductor, and the Idaho Congressional delegation, played a pivotal role in enabling the SHARE program to provide our Government and contractor customers with access to the advanced technology in our affordable software tools," continued Maurer.

Doug Hackler, CEO of American Semiconductor, states, "ASI's aggressive and novel utilization of Silvaco and Simucad simulation tools has been a key enabler for ASI's technology development and Foundry offerings -- for commercial customers, AFRL and other government programs -- as demonstrated in the success of our SHARE and Boeing programs."

Dr. Ivan Pesic, President and CEO of Simucad, remarked, "I would like to extend the warmest congratulations to Doug and all of the employees of ASI for their outstanding achievement as Boeing's technology supplier of the year. This award is a testament to ASI's technology and commitment to quality."

Awards page at Boeing's website:

http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2008/q2/080417b_nr_supplier.html#Technology

SOURCE: Simucad Design Automation