LONDON — Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (Migdal Haemek, Israel), an independent specialty foundry, and Triune Systems LLC (Richardson, Texas), an IC design and test development provider, have said they plan to collaborate on developing a power management platform for Tower's foundry customers.

The companies are creating intellectual property (IP) for Tower's 0.18-micron bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process to deliver a family of low- and high-voltage power management products and IP for a variety of applications. In particular, the companies plan to develop zero mask adder non-volatile memory blocks, based on Tower's Y-Flash technology, suitable specifically for 5-V operation on high voltage platforms. High volume production for the high-voltage power management products is expected to commence in the second half of 2009.

Tower's 0.18-micron and 0.5-micron BCD processes come with a suite of analog components including complementary bipolar, MIM caps, high sheet resistance resistors, Zeners and Schottky diodes. Tower provides embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) on its power management BCD advanced logic process with full flash capability from 32-bit to 1-Mbit at no additional mask count.

The worldwide shipment of power management ICs is expected to grow more than 10 percent per annum through 2012 with demand arising for power supplies in consumer, medical, industrial and automotive applications.

"The collaboration with Triune Systems and its contribution to the design of the scalable Y-Flash based NVM blocks will complement our business strategy and core competencies in the consumer, medical, industrial and automotive markets," said Avi Strum, specialty business unit vice president at Tower, in a statement.

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