Key Foundry, an 8-inch pure-play foundry in Korea, announces an enhanced 0.13µm BCD process to enable automotive power fabless companies to design high-performance automotive semiconductor products.

Enhanced BCD Process

SK keyfoundry’s enhanced 0.13µm BCD process has met the requirements of AEC-Q100’s Grade-0, reliability test standard for automotive electronic components. Also, it qualifies as a suitable process for high-performance and high-reliability automotive semiconductors. Basically, they withstand the ambient operating temperature up to 150°C. Specifically, the process offers high-voltage devices up to 120V and implements insulation technology above 15KV at the same time. Thus, it enables the design of high-voltage and high-reliability products. Among them are battery management system (BMS) IC, isolated gate driver IC, DC-DC IC, and CAN/LIN transceiver IC for use in electric vehicles.

In addition, high-density Flash memory IPs are now used in a high-voltage BCD process. Thus, it becomes a suitable process technology for automotive semiconductors. Among them include motor driver IC, LED driver IC, sensor controller IC, Power Delivery controller IC that require MCU functionality. In particular, programming of Flash IP can reach up to 100,000 times. This enables customers to use it extensively for high-performance products that require repeated data changes.

The automotive power semiconductor market is expected to continue to expand macroscopically. The proliferation of electric vehicles and increasing in-vehicle electronics will drive this trend. OMDIA said the automotive power semiconductor market will grow from $20.8 billion in 2023 to $32.5 billion in 2028, at a CAGR of 9.3%.

SK keyfoundry has continued to develop high-performance process technologies suitable for automotive semiconductors. Also, it has passed production quality audits for automotive components from top-tier (Tier-1) global automotive vendors with stringent quality requirements due to its high-quality control levels. Accordingly, it enabled the company to provide foundry services that meet customer needs. At the same time, it secured high process reliability for vehicles.

“Despite the limited number of foundries offering automotive power semiconductor processes, we have continued to improve our automotive high-voltage BCD processes with high performance,” said Derek D. Lee, CEO of SK keyfoundry, emphasizing the company’s technology development efforts. “With more than 10 years of mass production experience with major automotive fabless companies and the quality of our mass production, we will strongly pursue our business strategy to secure a solid growth base in the 8-inch automotive power semiconductor market in the future.”

-25 April 2024-