Rapid CMOS · Eindhoven, NL
Custom silicon, made accessible.
Design with familiar tools. Iterate in weeks.
Manufacture from a handful of dies to a full wafer.
xSilica Rapid CMOS is currently in technical validation. Pilot access is available for selected projects.
Silicon for the electronics between sensors and software.
Not every chip needs billions of transistors.
Many products need sensing, interfacing, timing, logic and control. For these functions, customization and development speed can matter more than leading-edge transistor density.
Industrial Control
Sensor interfaces, control, mixed-signal integration, timing and specialized logic for industrial electronics.
Explore Industrial ControlAerospace & Defense
Low-volume, specialized and long-lifecycle electronics where development speed, supply-chain control and sovereignty matter.
Explore Aerospace & DefenseAutomotive
Rapid custom silicon for functional prototypes, architecture validation and early engineering samples before production-qualified silicon is required.
Explore Automotive DevelopmentData Center Infrastructure
Monitoring, management and control silicon for the infrastructure around compute.
Explore Data Center InfrastructureHome & IoT
Application-specific electronics for connected products, appliances and embedded systems.
Explore Home & IoTMedical & Scientific
Specialized mixed-signal, control and interface silicon for medical devices, laboratory equipment and scientific instrumentation.
Explore Medical & ScientificThe problem
Custom silicon usually enters too late.
There is a large class of product companies that could benefit from application-specific silicon but never starts an ASIC programme.
The reason is not necessarily volume. Conventional custom silicon requires several commitments at the same time:
Capital
Enough budget to justify a substantial development programme before the first physical result exists.
Expertise
Specialist IC design knowledge, semiconductor tooling and manufacturing experience that many otherwise capable electronics teams do not have internally.
Time
Months between committing a design and learning what the physical silicon actually does.
Requirements maturity
Enough confidence in the product architecture to justify freezing important decisions before fabrication begins.
Together, those requirements push custom silicon towards the end of product development.
Many teams stay with microcontrollers, FPGAs and discrete components instead, even where a custom IC would produce a better product.
xSilica exists to move custom silicon earlier into that learning curve.
Two ways to manufacture
Dedicated Wafer
Your project. Your wafer.
A complete xSilica CMOS manufacturing run dedicated to one project.
Dedicated Wafer is intended for larger designs, higher prototype quantities and projects where manufacturing should begin immediately after technical acceptance.
You receive the usable dies produced from your wafer, subject to manufacturing yield.
Configure a RunFlexMPW
Share the wafer, not the schedule.
FlexMPW continuously combines compatible projects onto shared wafers.
There is no quarterly tape-out date to wait for.
Submit the quantity you need, specify how much flexibility you have, and xSilica continuously calculates a manufacturable wafer from the projects currently available.
When a viable wafer is complete, the run closes and manufacturing begins.
Explore FlexMPWIllustrative FlexMPW run
FLEX-CMOS-5UM-3V3IO-4M-2609.2
Rapid CMOS · 4-metal · 100 mm
- Projects
- 7 committed
- Status
- Forming — pilot run
- Selected
- Hover the wafer
Platform preview. Run data shown for illustrative purposes only.
Designed as one system
Accessibility has to be designed into the whole system.
Traditional semiconductor development separates process technology, chip design and manufacturing equipment.
xSilica develops all three around one objective: make custom silicon practical to design, iterate and manufacture.
xSilica develops and controls the fabrication recipe underlying Rapid CMOS: the materials, chemistry, process sequence and operating windows required to reproducibly turn silicon wafers into functional transistors and interconnect.
The objective is not maximum transistor density.
Every process decision is evaluated against manufacturability, repeatability, equipment complexity and iteration speed.
The result is a deliberately constrained mature-node CMOS platform for useful digital, analog and mixed-signal electronics.
xSilica is developing its design flow around workflows electronics engineers already understand: schematic capture, reusable components, SPICE simulation, VHDL, logic synthesis and automated design checks.
Process constraints are embedded into the toolchain rather than left for the designer to interpret.
The objective is simple: valid designs should be manufacturable by construction.
Manufacturing
Lower fab complexity changes the economics of silicon.
Conventional semiconductor fabs contain extremely expensive equipment and infrastructure. Those assets need to remain highly utilized, which naturally favors large volumes, batching and long production queues.
xSilica takes the opposite starting point. By simplifying the semiconductor process, we can also simplify the equipment required to manufacture it.
Compact, purpose-built manufacturing equipment reduces the capital tied up in each unit of production capacity. That means less production has to be aggregated before manufacturing becomes economical.
That is what makes rapid Dedicated Wafer manufacturing and continuously filling FlexMPW runs possible.
One constrained platform.
Easier design.
Shorter iteration cycles.
Lower commitment per experiment.