Advanced Process Technology
Alchip’s technical focus is always on enabling customer products that use the most leading edge process in the market much ahead of customers’ competitors. With today’s advanced design technology, the investment in design tools specialized in advanced technology is very costly and the risk to achieve first-time-success is high for our customers. Alchip always strive to be the top technology leader in order to provide our excellent ASIC service to our customers for lowering their entry barrier to using the leading edge process technologies.
Advanced Process Technology
Alchip’s technical focus is always on enabling customer products that use the most leading edge process in the market much ahead of customers’ competitors. With today’s advanced design technology, the investment in design tools specialized in advanced technology is very costly and the risk to achieve first-time-success is high for our customers. Alchip always strive to be the top technology leader in order to provide our excellent ASIC service to our customers for lowering their entry barrier to using the leading edge process technologies.
Just one year after the establishment of the company in 2003, we completed the 90nm SoC design with the drastic reduction in die size and power, much ahead of other companies where the 180nm / 130nm processes were still the mainstream at the time. And we then succeeded in starting the first 90nm mass production for our customer.
The GRAPE-DR supercomputer chip, which was TSMC’s first product tape-out in the 90nm process, became a major topic after a press release at that time, and in fact, this successful experience was a good turning point for today’s Alchip technology.
’06In 2006, we developed a variety of chips that were developed in series using the 65nm process.
In 2009, we continued to contribute to improving power and performance and reducing costs through leading-edge processes such as 40nm for supercomputer and game machine chips.
’10In 2010, we continued to meet the demand trend of the most advanced 28nm process node and succeeded with increasingly diverse products. It was also during this period that new markets such as entertainment, video codecs, TV engines, and even Bitcoin mining chips were developed.
’15In 2015, the transition from conventional planar transistors to tri-gate FinFET transistors occurred in 16nm, which substantially increased the physical design complexity and cost of chip development. This year, we succeeded in the first development of TSMC’s 16nm process that applied FinFET transistors ahead of other companies.
Since then, we have always been at the forefront of successful development for every new generation FinFET nodes released such as 12nm and 7nm.
’18Since 2018, we have succeeded in developing various HPC chips, AI chips, and cryptocurrency mining chips one after another by using 12nm and 7nm processes, and we are continuing to challenge the next generation of processes such as N6 and N5P.
’17In 2017, the development of mining chips using advanced processes started to boom as cryptocurrency mining market (e.g. Bitcoin) is growing in recent years and “power efficiency” is a key to profitability when it comes to balance electricity consumption and how much currencies are mined. Alchip excelled in this demanding application and has established an enviable track record of excellence in Japan and overseas.
