As technology evolves, mask costs grow exponentially with each process generation. In the nanometer era, innovation and speed are the important keys of success factors. How to shorten the cycle of prototyping and new design/product development have been the major issues to conquer. If using the traditional ASIC flow for prototyping, it will cost too much money and time to verify. Once fail, the expense of photomask tooling and chip fabrication will be totally wasted.

　　Fortunately, MPW (Multi-Project Wafer) service can provide a good solution to conquer the disadvantages of cost and time. MPW service allows customers to share the cost of a common mask set, which is processed through an engineering-run to speed new products and new designs to silicon-proven status. The benefits of MPW are bigger and bigger while the masking technology evolves.

　　Different customers can delivery their design file to MPW service provider. Then their design will be translated on to the same mask sets with proper allocation. After the process of chip fabrication, MPW service provider will deliver the chips to the relatively specific customer. (See Fig-1)

 Fig-1 Different design projects can reduce the cost of design verification and mask tooling by PGC's MPW Turnkey Service.

MPW Service Programs
PGC offers many kinds of process to achieve customer's requirements. On the one hand, customers can find the best solution to their design projects from the 0.35um to the advanced 0.13um process. On the other hand, PGC takes care the total flow and commits the best quality of delivery. So customers could find the better solution for their verification or engineering sampling by PGC's MPW service programs. PGC provides two MPW service programs: prototyping and mass production programs.

Prototyping Program (0.13um/0.15um/0.18um/0.25um/0.35um)
For prototyping needs, customer can get some engineering samples by PGC MPW turnkey service. Customers only pay a proportion of NRE and wafer cost. PGC's service benefits customer not only the cost can be down by sharing the common mask but also the functional and silicon-based proving cycle could be substantially shortened. Basically, the cost and design cycle reduction are design-dependent. In cases of some special and advanced projects, the benefit is very significant.

Mass Production Program
The mass production program is available for customers that already utilized the prototyping program. After the prototyping process, customers can choose the further run of MPW service or the mass production program by their own photomasks.

MPW Turnkey Service Flow
At the querying stage, customers and PGC will communicate closely to make sure the design spec and MPW process are identical to fabricate. (See Fig-2) After completing the request and quotation activities, PGC will schedule the proper MPW process by customer's confirmation. PGC will handle all the turnkey actions to commit the delivery and quality while the design tape-in. (See Fig-3)

Based on PGC's MPW turnkey service customers can concentrate upon system prototyping or their following projects.

Fig-2: MPW turnkey service querying flow between customers and PGC.

The following Fig-3 shows the MPW turnkey service flow between customers and PGC at the delivery stage.

MPW Turnkey Service Cycle Time
In the general case, customer can get the engineering samples by MPW shuttle process time plus two weeks. The cycle time of PGC MPW service is shown as Fig-4.
Benefits
The benefits of PGC's MPW turnkey service to customer are following below,

• Suitable pilot run and less volume productions
• Cost-effective for silicon verifying and prototyping
• Compatibility with various EDA tools and libraries

Success Cases
As an excellent turnkey design service provider, PGC processes more than 10 MPW runs one year in average. PGC affiliates with professional photomask providers such as TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), MOSIS and CIC (Chip Implementation Center). Based on the partnerships, PGC can offer the reasonable delivery and price for our customers.