Renesas and TSMC extend collaboration

Renesas and TSMC to combine Renesas’ MONOS (Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon) technology with TSMC’s advanced CMOS process technologies and flexible production capacity. Furthermore, by making the MONOS process platform available to other semiconductor suppliers around the world (including fabless companies and IDMs), Renesas and TSMC aim to set up an ecosystem. “In order for us to achieve further global growth, we are confident that TSMC will provide us with significant benefits in accelerated time-to-volume production and maximum flexibility in addressing the volatile fluctuation of the market demand,” said Shinichi Iwamoto, Senior Vice President of Renesas Electronics Corporation. “Renesas is one of the leaders in the MCU market and the collaboration will help deliver the performance Renesas needs for new production introduction with the level of quality and reliability its customers have come to expect,” said Jason Chen, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at TSMC. Renesas’ MONOS (Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon) embedded flash technology MONOS is a structure in which each transistor in the flash cell consists of three layers—oxide, nitride, and oxide—on a silicon base, with a metal control gate at the top. Renesas has accumulated more than two decades of experience in the use of MONOS flash memory technology by providing MCUs for IC cards. Based on the track record in MONOS technology, Renesas successfully extended the technology by developing a split-gate (SG) structure suitable for MCU internal flash memory. The new “SG-MONOS”–type flash memory realizes MCUs with high reliability, high speed and low power consumption.