Linear Microsystems
Expediting System on Chip Development for the Semiconductor Industry

Over the past decade, integrated circuits (ICs) have become increasingly complex and expensive. To manufacture powerful chips, the semiconductor industry turned to impressive new designs and kept pace with the progressing levels of IC integrations. One such emerging trend is the System-on-Chip (SoC) technology and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The biggest challenge on that front is to service a wide variety of applications with accelerated technology development at a reasonable cost. Linear Microsystems Inc. (LMI) is helping its partner companies in the industry cross this hurdle with fast, low-cost, and reliable SOC and ASIC solutions.

LMI is a fabless semiconductor company providing high-performance RF, analog, and mixed-signal SOCs and ASICs for numerous applications. The company specializes in designing and developing in-house wafers, coupled with package testing and superior quality assurance. LMI’s solutions comply with the industry’s requirement of increased performance with high integration, reduced physical size, and power requirements at a low cost.

Most companies in the industry look toward partnering with manufacturers with much-needed chip expertise. The companies often don’t look for a one-off chip solution but a series of products or an IC group that is future-proof. LMI works with the companies to understand their long- and short-term goals and aids them in building a roadmap to fulfill their needs.

LMI’s “works right the first time” approach is significant for manufacturers. The team at LMI strives to make the first silicon prototype of any product functional so the client can start with system-level testing and expedite their time to market.

The company has various capabilities and an extensive intellectual property library to facilitate this. The library has a wide variety of proprietary properties, including sensors, transceivers, analog-to-digital converters, phase-locked loops, and amplifiers. For instance, data acquisition remains fundamental to all applications, whether a low-cost, low-power medical device or a high-performance RF product. LMI has wide micro-processing and digital signal processing capabilities to support data acquisition.

“While most companies keep the design and production team separate, we believe in the importance of being a one-stop shop chip solution provider by producing the ICs that we design,” states Denise Cocco, President and CEO, LMI. This expertise in designing and production helps the company make the whole process more efficient.

In production, LMI leverages the industry-leading fabs in the U.S. and offshore for a wide variety of technologies. It also has high rail packaging for military products, while most commercial product packaging is done offshore using conventional quad flat-pack no-lead (QFN) or ball grid array (BGA).

These capabilities of LMI are seen in a successful client collaboration when a customer, a new startup, ventured into the market to compete against a large and established semiconductor company. The startup wanted to offer high performance by integrating the analog, the memory, and the microprocessors cost-effectively on one chip, which would give them a significant advantage in the marketplace. But the client did not have a sizeable non-recurring engineering (NRE) budget. LMI designed a program with integrated firmware to fulfill these requisites on a reasonable budget and relatively short schedule. The client received a complete turnkey SOC solution, currently selling in the market precisely as developed, packaged, and pre-tested by LMI. The designed SOC had better performance than those produced by the big players, at a low cost. The SOC had to be sold in millions of units and required to be sub $1 in production volumes, which was made possible by the chip being packed very tightly.

LMI’s design and management team has served the ASIC business for over two decades, and it contends to position itself as a leading chip solution supplier that caters to all customer needs. Powered by innovative solutions, LMI works closely with customers to help the semiconductor industry offer best-in-class, tailor-made solutions.