austriamicrosystems Offers 10,000th Prototype Free

Mixed-signal foundry austriamicrosystems said today that its full service foundry business unit is on track to complete 10,000 device designs manufactured with its Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) shuttle service in Q1 2005.

To celebrate, the company said it would offer one MPW shuttle participation

The shuttle service is a scheduled, fast prototyping service designed to lower mask tooling costs and wafer costs by sharing the expenses with other companies. The MPW shuttle service allows fabless design houses to validate their designs prior to putting them into mass production at austriamicrosystems.

The service provides more then 50 start slots per year, either at austriamicrosystems for its 0.35-micron CMOS, high voltage CMOS and SiGe-BiCMOS process technologies or through other wafer prototyping organizations.

"Along our mission to provide extraordinary service to our customers for our specialty processes, the MPW Shuttle Service is a key element in the successful transfer of innovative products to mass production," Thomas Riener, director of marketing for the Full Service Foundry business unit of austriamicrosystems, said in a statement.

"In combination with our well-known HIT Kit process design kit, we offer our customers an easily accessible, cost-effective platform to develop the analog specialty products of the future," he said.