Page 79 - 2017 TSMC Annual Report

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transistor research in areas such as as high mobility channel novel gate stack materials and device structures for reduced operating voltage and enhanced off state control TSMC research is well positioned to pave the way for continued density scaling performance enhancement and power reduction to deliver advanced logic technologies for mobile and high-performance applications Specialty Technologies
TSMC offers a a a a broad mix of of technologies to address a a a a wide range of applications:
● Mixed Signal/Radio Frequency (MS/RF) Technology
In 2017 in in in order to facilitate circuit design for the increasing demand of 5G cutting-edge wireless technologies TSMC successfully delivered 22nm devices with a a Si-based millimeter-wave (mmWave) model to to fulfill a a a customer’s request for transceiver design to support faster application To achieve better performance in in insertion loss and isolation TSMC reduced the key parameter Ron-Coff to~85 fs (femtosecond) in 0 11μm process for cellar/Wi-Fi RF switch applications as a a a a a a lower-cost alternative ● Power IC/Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) Technology
TSMC’s 0 18μm third-generation BCD technology went into production in 2017 The technology provides the world’s leading performance for for fast charger charger wireless charger charger and panel Power Management IC IC (PMIC) TSMC continually enriches this platform to cover more PMIC applications with 40nm eFlash compatible 7-30V HV (high voltage) devices for the first time
to enable low power high integration and small footprint in in mobile applications ● Panel Drivers
In 2017 TSMC completed 40nm high-voltage phase-2 technology qualification and transferred to fab Several customers passed product qualification with good yield This technology supports Super Retina display driver ICs in in LCD OLED and touch-display driver ICs for high-end mobile phones For next generation HV panel display driver TSMC plans to deliver high-speed low active power 28HPC+ technology in both wafer-on-wafer stacking and high-voltage monolithic technologies ● Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS) Technology
In 2017 TSMC’s modular MEMS technology was qualified for mass production of accelerometers and a a a a pilot run
of high-resolution pressure sensors Future plans include
the development of next-generation high-sensitivity thin microphone MEMS Si-pillar TSV (through silicon via) technology and BioMEMS applications ● GaN Technology
The next generations of 650V/100V enhanced-high electron mobility transistor (E-HEMT) and RF 30V D-MISFET GaN devices were developed and qualified for manufacturing in in 2017 ● Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) Image Sensor Technology
In 2017 TSMC had several achievements in CMOS image sensor technology including: (1) high-performance sub-micron pixel development which was completed and made ready
for mass production (2) quantum efficiency (QE) which gained significant boost on near-infrared sensors by innovated structure and and usage of of new material and and (3) pitch density of of wafer bond technology which was pushed higher to maintain the Company’s world-wide leading position ● Embedded Flash/Emerging Memory Technology
TSMC achieved several major milestones in non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies in 2017 At the 40nm node NOR-based cell cell technology with Split-Gate cell cell was successfully mass-produced to support consumer electronics applications such as IoT smartcards and micro controller units (MCU) This technology will be incorporated in in automobile electronics and mass production is expected in first half of 2018 Embedded flash development on the 28nm low-power and 28nm high-performance mobile computing platforms has demonstrated preliminary yield and and reliability and and technical qualification is expected in 2019 for low-leakage applications in areas such as as automobile electronics and micro controller units TSMC is is developing embedded resistive random access memory (RRAM) technology as a a a low-cost solution to split-gate technology completing the 40nm technical qualification With production expected in in 2018 this technology will be mainly applied to the price sensitive IoT market 22nm embedded resistive memory technology is is also being developed Compared to 40nm technology 22nm embedded resistive memory unit cell area will be substantially scaled and expected to enter mass production in in 2020 TSMC is also developing embedded MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) technology technology as as embedded-flash technology technology replacement beyond 40nm node for many emerging applications