Tekmos' Blog

Last month I took a trip to Japan to meet with some of our customers.  We have started selling ASIC replacements in Japan.  Many Japanese customers had purchased their ASICs from the major Japanese semiconductor vendors.  And now, those same vendors have been End-Of-Life-ing their products.  This creates the same sort of demand for replacements ASICs as we have seen elsewhere.  And now that we have a partner in Solekia, it is a good time to increase our sales in Japan.

I have been to Japan once before, 25 years ago, on a trip to Osaka.  I had ventured into their subways, and backed right out again for fear of getting terribly lost because I couldn’t read the signs.  The fear never left me, and now I was going to have to face it on this trip.  Fortunately, I have my smart phone, with its’ built in GPS.  This allows me to know where I am, even if I can’t read a station sign.

As is frequently the case, the fear is worse than the reality.  While most station signs were in Japanese, there was always an English sign somewhere, and that was enough to get me to my destination.  My hosts were also concerned that I might disappear before an important meeting, so they met me at the hotel each morning to insure that I did arrive where I was supposed to be, and at the correct time.  I tried to go totally native, but I do admit to a strange longing every time I passed a McDonalds.

We visited two ASIC customers during my trip to Japan.  One was located in Tokyo, while the other was perhaps 200 miles north of Tokyo.  I rode the bullet train there at a speed of 150 mph, which was faster than I had been on a train before, with my old record being 100 mph in the UK.  It was a nice trip, and I enjoyed looking out the window at the countryside.

That area of Japan was near the reactors that were damaged in the Sendai earthquake, and some of the towns had erected public displays of the current Geiger counter readings.  That was interesting, though the readings were just ambient on a sunny day.

Tekmos provides replacements for obsolete ASICs and microcontrollers.  Our customers are those who manufacture systems that have a long lifetime, and are frequently under regulatory control or have technical reasons for not replacing their design.  As a result, they really need our product.  The job of our sales team is to find them. 

But finding them is tough.  Most sales forces call on the design teams, since that is where components are designed in.  However, since obsolescence tends to hit the manufacturing side, opportunities are frequently missed by the normal sales channels.  If we can’t find them, then we have to make it easier for the customer to find us, and that means advertising.

Twenty years ago, advertising was much simpler.  There were a number of free trade magazines that were delivered to key individuals.  All you had to do was to create a clever ad, and wait for the customer to call you.  That was then, and now the internet has killed the magazines.  Perhaps a fifth of our incoming calls are from the magazines themselves, begging us to accept a free subscription.

Nowadays, advertising is being listed by a search engine.  I just did a search for obsolete ASIC, and out of 8.2M hits, we were number 32.  Not bad, considering a number of hits were for ASIC tennis shoes.

Search engine advertising is a two prong effort.  The main activity is through web content, the more, the better.  And that is the main reason we have our newsletter and this blog.  The second prong involves the purchase of ads that are linked to key words. 

The newer fabrication technologies provide substantial performance advantages of increased speed and reduced power.  They also provide the disadvantage of increased mask cost.  And this makes many opportunities with lower volumes uneconomical.

But there is a way around the mask costs.  Most foundries offer shuttle runs.  A shuttle run divides the mask into multiple regions, and puts a different customer's design into each region.  The mask cost is shared by all of the customers, and is proportional to the area used by each design.  The fab then runs a lot of wafers with the shuttle mask set.  When the run is completed, the wafer is divided up, and each customer receives a small number of die. While the individual die is expensive, the total cost is much less than using a dedicated mask set and wafer run.  Additional wafers can be run using the same mask set, allowing small to medium volumes.   

The economics are interesting.  Assume a $500K total mask set charge, and a $4000 wafer cost.  A 5x5 mm die represents 1/16th of the mask area, and would appear 165 times on a 300 mm shuttle wafer.  The mask charge is reduced from $500K to $32K, while the die cost rises from $1.50 to $24.00.  This makes the volume breakeven point for buying a full mask set be 20K units.  There are a lot of opportunities that have volumes much less than 20K units.

The economic feasibility exists.  We now have to productize it in order to offer low cost ASICs in the 65 to 180 nm range.  And that will be the topic for a future newsletter.   

I attended the HiTEC 2012 (High Temperature Electronics Conference) in May.  The conference alternates every other year between the UK and Albuquerque.  While listening to the paper presentations is always educational, the real value in conferences is the opportunity to talk with prospective customers, and to visit the exhibit area and see which companies are exhibiting and what products they are featuring.

The amount of Federal R&D support has been dramatically reduced over the past few years, and that was reflected in a reduction in the amount of research papers.  This was partially made up with an increase in papers from the larger semiconductor companies.  Both TI and Analog Devices are making a renewed effort to offer high temperature products.  There were more companies exhibiting than two years ago, and there were more semiconductor products available.

We must always question how Tekmos compares to the competition in our high temperature offerings, and I think that we are doing well. It appears that most >200C chips are still produced internally by the users themselves, and that we are the only ones offering high temperature ASICs to run at 250°. Tekmos has achieved "tape out" on a high temperature ASIC designed to run at 250° C.

I also note that our internal developmental work is on a par with the published papers.  And I think we should expand our efforts and publish our own results in a future conference.

Albuquerque is a nice city, and I always enjoy visiting there.  The presence of Sandia Peak over looking the city adds a natural backdrop that is missing from many other cities.