Electronics Weekly
Called ‘Treo Platform’ it can produce ICs with rail voltage from 1V to 90V, and that work up to 175°C.
“This provides the foundation for a range of power and sensing solutions,” according to the company. “Multiple product families built on the Treo Platform are already sampling, including voltage translators, low-power analogue front-ends, low drop-out regulators, ultrasonic sensors, multi-phase controllers and single-pair Ethernet controllers.”
Also called ‘BCD65’ it is a 2.5V process with high-voltage extensions to between 5V and 90V.
Picking some examples, compared with the company’s earlier 180nm nominally 3.3V BCD process, ICs will be 0.45x smaller, have improved threshold matching, lower poly resistor shows mismatch coefficient, smaller poly-n-well capacitors for the same value, smaller bipolars with “excellent matching”, said OnSemi and 40% improved specific resistance for 45V DMOS transistors.
At the back-end, the metal stack has higher connection density, with ‘tapered metallisation’ to provide narrow high-density interconnect in lower metal layers, gradually widening and thickening to power routing in the upper layers. A move fem aluminum to damascene copper has reduced the resistance of the back-end stack.
“Digital libraries provide smaller digital standard cells, realising a 3x digital gate density improvement comparing the thick gate oxide flows, and a 6x improvement comparing the thin gate oxide flows,” said the company.
Porting an op-amp from 180nm BCD to Treo, said the company, resulted in a 5.1x improvement in its power-performance-area metric (power 2.2x, performance =, area 2.32x), and the same with a comparator scored 7.6x (power 2.92x, performance =, area (2.6).
Treo-based automotive LED drivers, dc-dc converters and electrical safety ICs are in the pipeline.
Two ICs using the process have been announced:
T30HM1TS2500, an IEEE 802.3cg compliant Ethernet transceiver with integrated CSMA/CD MAC (media access controller) and PHY (physical layer), with physical layer collision avoidance (PLCA).
Communication multiple nodes on shared connections is at 10Mbit/s and SPI at up to 25MHz is used to interface with the rest of the hardware.
T30LMXT3V4T245 is a 4bit configurable dual-supply translating bidirectional transceivers with 3-state outputs. The two data ports, A and B, operate from their own power supply rails: VccA and VccB, which independently can both be anywhere from 900mV to 3.6V.
It can typically operate at 100Mbit/s converting ≥1.1V to 1.2V, or 400Mbit/s converting ≥1.8V to 3.3V.
T30LMXT3VH4T245 (there is a ‘VH’ in there instead of a ‘V’) is similar, but includes ‘bus-hold’ to keep floating inputs at a valid logic level. “Use of pull-up or pull-down resistors with the bus-hold circuitry is not recommended”. said the company.
