Philips ramped up three key 90-nm CMOS products into volume production at the Crolles2 Alliance wafer fab in Crolles, France. The products are baseband chips for highly integrated system-inapackage (SiP) connectivity solutions.

This ramp-up to high-volume 90nm CMOS production means Philips will soon begin transferring manufacturing to TSMC.

The agreement originated from a joint development program that guarantees process alignment between Philips' and TSMC's 90nm CMOS process technologies.

It is no coincidence that the high-volume 90nm CMOS products being produced by Philips are destined for integration into the company's SiP solutions for a number of applications, such as Bluetooth and wireless local area network connectivity.

System-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions for these applications are often constrained to older process technologies because of the need to fabricate the entire chip (analog, digital, RF, memory ) in a single process. SiP solutions, on the other hand, can exploit immediate benefits in terms of size, cost ,and power consumption by migrating their digital baseband functionality to the latest CMOS technologies.