Date: 03/04/2012

Cosmic develops its interface IPs at 28nm and 20nm nodes

Bangalore, India based semiconductor IP vendor Cosmic Circuits has announced the development of MIPI D-PHY, MIPI M-PHY, USB2.0, USB3.0, PCI Express and HDMI IPs in 28 and 20nm. Cosmic Circuits is also developing the controller solutions for these standards in order to provide customers with a complete solution.

The 28nm MIPI solutions (D-PHY and M-PHY) have already been taped out and evaluation boards with the 28nm silicon are expected to be available in the next quarter. The MIPI D-PHY is based on v1.1 of the D-PHY specifications and supports up to 1.5Gbps. The MIPI M-PHY is based on v1.4 of the M-PHY specifications and is ideally suited for usage in applications such as DigRFv4, UFS, CSI-3, LLI and SSIC. The IP also supports both the SYS and PWM modes of low-speed operation making it a universal PHY. The MIPI D-PHY and M-PHY are expected to be used widely and given the need for multiple configurations, the implementation of the IPs has been kept modular. Application boards with Cosmic Circuits' 40nm M-PHY and DigRFv4 controller are now available for evaluation and prototyping.

The 28nm tape-outs for the rest of the connectivity IPs are scheduled through the course of this year and Cosmic Circuits is now actively engaging with several customers on these platforms. The 20nm tape-outs will commence this year and extend into 2013. Cosmic Circuits is also developing the controller IP for these standards to offer customers a complete solution.

Ganapathy Subramaniam, CEO of Cosmic Circuits, commented that "We are constantly looking at ways to serve our customers better and are following up on our success with the MIPI IPs by significantly expanding our connectivity portfolio. We are very glad that our close-knit engagement with customers has resulted in a strong roadmap that extends into the very advanced process nodes. We have a lot of experience with semiconductor IP and appreciate the different challenges that our customers face in the market place today. We are taking these IPs through rigorous internal and external QA processes to ensure that our customers get a time-to-market advantage with very high confidence on first-pass silicon success. We continue to expand on our AMS IP offering and will provide a single-stop access to analog, mixed-signal and connectivity IPs."