Deca Technologies Announces Company Launch
November 09 2011 - 2:18AM
Marketwired
Charting a new course for the future of electronic systems,
Deca Technologies has launched a breakthrough
approach to creating advanced electronic interconnect solutions.
Leveraging the unique, cost-effective solar wafer manufacturing
methods of SunPower Corp. (NASDAQ: SPWRA) (NASDAQ: SPWRB) and
financial, operational and manufacturing support from
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NASDAQ: CY), Deca's
proprietary solutions uniquely position it to reshape the way the
world designs and manufactures electronic devices.
Deca's initial products include a series of WLCSP (Wafer Level
Chip Scale Packaging) derivatives targeted at the current $1
billion-plus WLP (Wafer Level Packaging) market. Growth in WLPs
continues to be driven primarily by the desire of handset OEMs to
integrate more features and functionality into less space.
Miniaturization, cost and performance benefits increasingly lead to
a preference for WLP solutions. However, as traditional strip-based
package technologies give way to advanced wafer-based methods,
significant capital strain and cycle time challenges have burdened
the supply chain.
Deca's investors include Cypress and SunPower. The new company
is part of Cypress's Emerging Technology Division. Cypress drives
entrepreneurship and innovation by funding autonomous businesses in
much the same way venture capital companies fund startups. This
approach has delivered multiple successes for Cypress and its
shareholders, including SunPower, which was spun out of Cypress in
2008 in a $2.6-billion tax-free shareholder distribution.
"We saw an incredible opportunity to apply SunPower's solar
wafer processing technology and methods to slash through the
capital and cycle time constraints that have held back rapid
acceptance of advanced interconnect solutions," commented Tim
Olson, Deca president and CEO. "Our unique approach enables
breakthrough new product capabilities, improved cycle time and
unrivaled flexibility, all at the price point the industry requires
for mass adoption."
"SunPower continues to set the world's standard for
high-efficiency silicon solar cells with our proprietary advanced
wafer processing methods, which originally grew out of
semiconductor manufacturing processes," noted Tom Werner, SunPower
president & CEO. "When Tim approached us with the idea to adapt
our technology 'back' into semiconductors, and to address an
industrywide challenge, we signed on as knowledge property
providers and investors in Deca Technologies."
In a board presentation on the future of silicon interconnect,
Cypress President and CEO T.J. Rodgers said:
"As Moore's Law has progressed over the course of my career from
dimensions of 10 microns (or 10,000 nanometers) to 28 nanometers --
a factor of 357 linearly and 127,000 in area -- integrated circuits
have progressed by a factor of 10 million, from simple chips with
just 100 transistors to billion-transistor chips, such as Cypress's
new 144-megabit SRAM. Moore's Law has also improved the speed of
Cypress's memories 15-fold, from 25 ns in 1983 to 1.6 ns today. And
during that same period, power per function has actually come down.
Today, our revolutionary PSoC 3 chip -- which contains a computer,
its associated program and data memories, 24 programmable digital
blocks, 20 fixed digital functions and 20 high-performance analog
blocks -- uses only 3.6 mW of power, four times less than the power
of the sunlight that strikes an area the size of the chip.
"Despite this breathtaking progress, there is an economic
problem preventing the full integration promised by Moore's Law:
advanced semiconductor chips are becoming so specialized that they
can't be integrated into one chip. For example, due to process
incompatibilities, there are no microprocessors available today
with integrated DRAM. The process for one type of chip, for
example, a 0.35-micron RF chip, may cost $0.02 per square
millimeter -- making it horribly uneconomical to integrate an RF
block onto a microprocessor wafer costing $0.10 per square
millimeter. Today's systems contain very different chips made in
different processes, in different fabs, and even in different
countries. They therefore cannot be integrated on silicon and must
be connected on PC boards, an ancient technology with 500-micron
dimensions and a host of reliability problems.
"We want to use the dense, reliable silicon interconnect
inherent in Moore's Law to integrate the dissimilar chips used in
today's systems, but we face an economic barrier because the
interconnect on silicon chips is 1,000 times more expensive than
the interconnect on PC boards.
"We could enable a new silicon-based interconnect paradigm if we
could make silicon interconnect wafers for $10, just what silicon
solar wafers cost today. The problem of mapping solar technology
onto Moore's Law is straightforward, but difficult, and we believe
DecaTech has the answer."
With respect to Deca's initial product offering, E. Jan
Vardaman, president and founder of TechSearch International, stated
that WLPs will maintain double-digit unit growth with a CAGR of
12.5 percent and annual volumes exceeding 20 billion units by
2014.
"We are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this expanding
market," Olson said. "We have met stringent reliability
requirements and are now fully qualified for production with first
revenue expected in early 2012. Given the high level of customer
interest and engineering activity, we anticipate multiple
additional customer qualifications in the next few quarters. With
typical handset OEM PCN (Product Change Notice) acceptance windows
averaging around one additional quarter, we are planning for our
production ramp in late 2012."
About Deca Technologies Inc
Deca Technologies is an advanced electronic interconnect
solutions provider that initially provides wafer level chip scale
packaging (WLCSP) services to the semiconductor industry. Deca's
unique integration of solar and semiconductor technologies provides
our customers with unrivaled new product introduction, rapid cycle
time and powerful flexibility, all with the best value in the
industry. Deca Technologies is a majority owned and fully
independent subsidiary of Cypress. For more information, please
visit www.decatechnologies.com.
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