AMIS Makes the Grade

In time for the start of a new school year, AMI Semiconductor (AMIS) today renewed its partnership with MOSIS to participate in the MOSIS multiproject wafer (MPW) program and MOSIS education program (MEP).

Under the agreement, AMIS will continue to provide a quarterly run of wafers at no cost

“The prototyping costs of many new designs make them impractical to manufacture on a dedicated run basis,” said MOSIS director Cewar Pina, in a statement.

Through the MPW program, development and manufacturing expenses are shared across multiple MOSIS customers by consolidating separate chip designs onto a single wafer. The wafers are processed in AMIS fabs in a variety of mixed-signal/analog CMOS process technologies, ranging from 1.5 micron to 0.35 micron.

Aside from the primary goal of helping to advance technology in the IC community, AMIS hopes to realize benefits closer to home.

"Through its support of MEP, AMIS is helping to educate and train future semiconductor design engineers," said Al Morrison, VP of AMIS’s mixed-signal foundry business, in the statement. "Graduating students and small or startup businesses using these programs represent possible future employees, partners or customers of AMIS who will have experience designing and working with our manufacturing processes."

MEP supports more than 5,000 students per year and generates more than 1,000 designs per year. These designs are used for classroom instruction and unsponsored research, giving engineering students hands-on, practical IC design and manufacturing experience.