Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, announced yesterday that it has shipped nearly 600,000 8-inch (20cm) wafers using 0.25-micron embedded flash process technology for various automotive applications.
The Hsinchu-based company said in a press release that automotive IC products reliant on these “AEC-Q100 grade 1”-qualified embedded flash wafers, accounting for more than 720 million microcontrollers, can endure 10,000 write/erase cycles and function under stringent temperature ranging from minus-40°C to 125°C.
“Shipping 600,000 automotive qualified 8-inch 0.25-micron embedded flash wafers that set standards for endurance and lifelong quality underscores TSMC’s ongoing commitment to the automotive electronics industry,” Lin Cheng-ming (林振銘), director of TSMC’s embedded flash business development division, said in the statement.
TSMC is the first company in the global foundry business to offer its customers wafers based on an AEC-Q100-qualified embedded flash process technology.
Last year, some of its customers have seen their automotive IC products using such wafers achieve a field failure rate of less than 0.1 parts per million (ppm), compared with the typical single-digit figure rate, TSMC said.
The company added that this was an exceptionally low failure rate for embedded flash devices.
TSMC said in November it planned to produce automotive-graded ICs in its Fab 10 in Shanghai, China.
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