Moortec Rolls IP on TSMC FinFET, Adds Design Center

　　Plymouth, U.K.-based Moortec Semiconductor has added a design center in Gdansk, Poland, and announced availability of its embedded process, voltage, and temperature (PVT)-monitoring intellectual property on TSMC’s 12-nanometer FinFET Compact (FFC) process technology.

　　Moortec has a 15-strong engineering team in the United Kingdom but decided to establish the design center in Gdansk to support its expansion over the past three years as an IP vendor. The company is recruiting analog designers now to staff the new location under design center manager Szymon Gerka.

　　Asked why the company had selected Gdansk, marketing VP Ramsay Allen said one reason was the opportunity to have Gerka head up the center. Gerka had left Moortec last year and returned to Gdansk, and was subsequently approached by Moortec to establish a design team in the city, Allen said.

　　“There are good advanced-node analog design engineers there,” Allen added. “Our plan is to grow quite quickly [in Gdansk] to support and work with our U.K. design team.”

　　Gdansk appears to be an emerging tech cluster. Arrow Electronics last year said it was expanding its presence in Poland with a new office in the city. Amazon established a development center there three years ago, and today Amazon developers and researchers in Gdansk are working on distributed systems and on evolving technologies such as text-to-speech and natural-language understanding.

　　Moortec CTO Oliver King said in a statement that the Gdansk design center “will allow Moortec to accelerate its engineering efforts in terms of its advanced-node roadmap … We also recognize the valuable, highly professional and talented engineering resource that Poland has to offer.”

　　Allen stated, “We are looking forward to growing the team and continuing to provide highly accurate, highly featured monitoring IP to optimize the performance and reliability of today’s modern SoCs, whether for consumer, telecommunications, data center, and enterprise applications or for emerging markets” such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

　　Embedded sensing IP on FFC

　　According to Moortec, the availability of the company’s embedded sensing IP on the TSMC 12-nm FFC process lets advanced-node-IC developers detect process variation in 12-nm core digital devices. The process monitor can also be used to enable continuous dynamic frequency and voltage scaling (DVFS) optimization, measure gate delay, conduct critical-path and critical-voltage analyses, and monitor silicon “aging.”

　　The subsystem includes a low-power, self-contained voltage monitor IP block designed to monitor voltage levels within the core logic voltage domains and provide accurate IR drop analysis. A high-precision, low-power junction temperature sensor, developed to be embedded into ASIC designs, completes the system and can be used for applications such as DVFS, device lifetime enhancement, device characterization, and thermal profiling.

　　The package includes a sophisticated PVT controller with Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture Advanced Peripheral Bus (AMBA APB) interfacing to support multiple monitoring instances, statistics gathering, and a production test access port.

　　In-chip monitoring has become an important factor in the design and performance optimization of small-geometry designs. Since 2010, Moortec has offered an embedded PVT sensing fabric for use with CMOS technologies from 40 nm down to 7 nm.

　　“Advanced-node-IC developers need to maintain product competitiveness. Embedded monitoring [enables] individual chip optimization for power or speed, providing a significant benefit to the design community,” Stephen Crosher, CEO of Moortec, said in a statement. “We are pleased to be providing such technology enablement on TSMC's 12-nm technology and to be working with the ecosystem’s customers.”