TowerJazz has announced that its advanced analog specialty RF and high-performance analog (HPA) manufacturing processes are addressing the increasing demand for analog semiconductor content in the fast-growing automotive market, especially ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and autonomous driving. TowerJazz is serving this market through best-in-class RF and HPA technology solutions developed through close partnerships and roadmap alignment with market leaders and world-class global customer support.
RF for automotive falls into two broad categories: wireless connectivity and automotive radar, with automotive radar having the largest share of today’s RF semiconductor content. Automotive radar systems have become a relatively standard feature in today’s premium and mid-range automobiles for performing safety and driver assistance tasks such as forward collision avoidance/warning, lane departure warnings, blind spot detection, and parking assist. Wireless connectivity semiconductor content is expected to grow rapidly as well with the number of connected cars quadrupling over the next five years.
According to a new market research report by MarketsandMarkets, the automotive semiconductor market is expected to increase from $35B in 2016 to over $48B by 2022. The increasing demand for automobiles coupled with the overall trend of vehicle electrification is driving the growth of this market. Automotive semiconductor content remains dominated by analog with a 69% share of the total market, with RF semiconductor content expected to grow over the coming years with a double-digit CAGR.
With increasing adoption of ADAS - and eventual migration to fully autonomous vehicles - as many as seven to twelve radar systems may be incorporated into each car. Furthermore, increasing adoption of GPS, 4G-LTE (transitioning soon to 5G) and V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communications will augment the RF semiconductor content in vehicles further expanding the RF semiconductor market for automobiles beyond $1.8B by 2021 with a brisk CAGR of more than 14% (according to a 2016 MarketsandMarkets report on the ADAS market and company estimates).
Because of the high performance needed at high frequencies for automotive radar systems (24 - 26 GHz for short-range and 76 - 81 GHz for long range), the TowerJazz SiGe Terabit Platform is ideally suited to serve this exciting and growing market. TowerJazz’s SBC18H2 through SBC18H5 SiGe technologies offer Ft of 240 - 300 GHz and Fmax of 280 - 340 GHz, providing customers latitude to optimize speed and noise requirements for their specific applications. It’s SiGe Terabit Platform comes with two CMOS options: 1.8V/3.3V (180 nm) and 1.2V/3.3V (130 nm).
All of TowerJazz’s SiGe technologies offer customizable metallization schemes and high-performance passives (MIM capacitors and inductors) to tailor the offering to each customer’s specific end-application. For more cost-sensitive applications, they also provide a complete 65 nm RFCMOS technology platform in its Uozu, Japan factory. For wireless connectivity solutions, they offers a front-end module-on-a-chip RF platform in addition to advanced RFSOI and RFCMOS technology offerings with best-in-class Ron-Coff for switches and noise figures for low-noise amplifiers.
