LOS ANGELES and BLOOMINGTON, Minn., Nov. 29, 2022 — The MOSIS Service of the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California and SkyWater Technology, today announced a collaboration to enable design-to-manufacturing for integrated circuit (IC) prototyping and production utilizing SkyWater’s CMOS process technologies. The MOSIS Service will provide multi-project wafer (MPW) shuttle access to SkyWater’s S90 and S130 mixed-signal CMOS technologies.

The collaboration enables The MOSIS Service to provide customers with the ability to leverage SkyWater foundry strengths throughout the design cycle. In its role as a technical representative of the foundry, The MOSIS Service enables design verification so customers can meet project milestones and tapeout sign-off goals. MOSIS provides help with design tasks ranging from PDK utilization, EDA tools, RTL-to-GDS, IP, block-level and chip-level physical verification, and tapeout closure. MOSIS’ support allows design teams to focus on implementing their design ideas while achieving successful tapeouts on time and with high quality.

The MOSIS Service also has expert knowledge on packaging substrate design and the technical management of packaging vendors. These services add value to the PDK and manufacturing capacities of SkyWater. MOSIS and SkyWater envision new and significant services to the microelectronics community, leading to innovative, start-up design organizations that will successfully achieve chip production through the SkyWater-MOSIS project flows.

“With SkyWater being an important driver of electronic innovation and resurgence of U.S. technological leadership, we are pleased to join the effort. The MOSIS Service has enabled the fabless design model and added significant value to the community for more than 40 years. We are confident in the fruitful outcome of this collaboration,” said Craig Knoblock, Keston Executive Director of USC’s Information Sciences Institute. “SkyWater has an outstanding customer portfolio ranging across military electronics, automotive, IoT, bioelectronics, and others. MOSIS has a long-term customer base of defense, academic, and consumer electronics. We believe customers from the community will enjoy the support coming with this partnership soon.”

“We are excited to launch projects with SkyWater Technology,” said Lifu Chang, Director of The MOSIS Service. “SkyWater is the commercial foundry that offers such a wide variety of manufacturing capabilities for electronic devices across different substrate materials. SkyWater provides PDK files suitable for designs with device and process options, such as non-volatile memory and advanced packaging, and has therefore enabled many different chip functions and integrations. The MOSIS Service has started the collaboration with the mixed-signal CMOS 130nm and 90nm processes. Our tightly integrated collaboration will support our customers’ projects.”

SkyWater’s Chief Technology Officer, Steve Kosier, said, “This collaboration enhances the technical offerings from both SkyWater and MOSIS in both breadth and depth. We plan to rapidly expand our fab facilities with the national focus on expediting domestic electronics design-to-manufacturing based on our technology foundation. We envision many new projects coming from the defense industry base and other market segments.”

Kosier added, “SkyWater expects an increasing need for design enablement and support for these projects. We are pleased to partner with MOSIS at this critical time. We are confident that our customers will enjoy the services and experience MOSIS brings to the IC design value stream when accessing SkyWater technologies.”

About The MOSIS Service

The MOSIS Service was founded in 1981 at Information Sciences Institute, Viterbi School of Engineering of University of Southern California. DARPA provided the contract for The MOSIS Service to facilitate the first manufacturing projects for fabless organizations. The MOSIS Service pioneered the Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) model. The MOSIS Service has processed over 60,000 designs at more than a dozen foundries. Customers of The MOSIS Service have included US Government Laboratories, foreign and domestic corporations, and foreign and domestic universities. MOSIS has enabled IC designers to prototype innovative semiconductor designs in CMOS FinFET, FD-SOI, Bulk, high-voltage BCD, III-V compound, and other specialty processes.

About SkyWater Technology

SkyWater (NASDAQ: SKYT) is a U.S.-owned semiconductor manufacturer and a DMEA-accredited Category 1A Trusted foundry. SkyWater’s Technology as a Service℠ model streamlines the path to production for customers with development services, volume production and heterogeneous integration solutions in its world-class U.S. facilities. This pioneering model enables innovators to co-create the next wave of technology with diverse categories including mixed-signal CMOS, ROICs, rad-hard ICs, power management, MEMS, superconducting ICs, photonics, carbon nanotubes and interposers. SkyWater serves growing markets including aerospace & defense, automotive, biomedical, cloud & computing, consumer, industrial and IoT.

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Source: Skywater