Rohm’s European Design Center in growth phase
The EDC is based at Rohm’s European headquarters in Willich, Germany, and Davis took the R&D director position six years ago with the task of creating a European development operation from the ground up.
As the name suggests Rohm started out by making resistors but over time has expanded to making diodes, transistors and on to integrated circuits. ICs and discrete semiconductors now account for the majority of Rohm’s revenue. Later, the company began manufacturing discrete semiconductor devices and integrated circuits. This was bolstered by Rohm’s acquisition of the semiconductor operations of Japan’s Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd., which have been renamed as Lapis Semiconductor, in 2008. In 2009 Rohm acquired Kionix Inc. (Ithaca, New York) taking the company into inertial MEMS technology and products.
The presence in passives and discrete devices and expertise in packaging has helped Rohm to gain customers in the areas of mobile phones and automotive electronics while it also provides power semiconductors for industrial applications, said Davis. ICs, MEMS and discrete transistors now make up more than 80 percent of Rohm’s total revenue.
But Davis makes the point that, unlike many other semiconductor companies, Rohm has not chosen to outsource manufacturing and go fab-lite or fabless.
"Rohm is highly vertically integrated. We more or less do everything from pulling silicon ingots to making our own test machines and we have our own unique semiconductor manufacturing processes," Davis said.
The EDC is more about product development and design than research with a strong emphasis on supporting European customers, in areas such as automotive. Davis explained that it was started with the assignment of a number of Japanese researchers to Willich as a method of transfering projects, expertise and culture to the European group. "We were 38 people at the peak but gradually many of those assignees have returned to Japan. We are looking to get back to about that size. We are in a growth phase," he said.
Next European developed products
European developed products
One example of a product that was developed at the EDC, that is present on Rohm’s Electronica booth, the BD18377 12 channel LED driver automotive product. The product is AEC-Q100 qualified and is a family of parts that offer LED lighting accuracy along with software programmability and a host of monitoring, diagnostic and control functions.
One of the key attributes is that it balances up the drive to up to 12 LEDs. It provides 12 constant current output channels of up to 50mA per channel together with 6-bit brightness calibration. Six global PWM channels allow dimming from almost 0 to 100 percent on all outputs.
"This provides circuit protection and lowers the cost of sourcing LEDs because they don’t have to be tested and binned for uniformity," said Davis. "Having uniform and differentiating dashboard lighting is very important to automotive makers and we’ve already got a couple of design wins with flagship car makers."
Davis also draws attention to a family of low quiescent current dc-dc synchronous buck converters. The BD9901x family that provides a 2A output over an input supply range from 42V down to 3.6V.
The increasing popularity of electric and hybrid vehicles has led to more sophisticated electronic systems and a greater demand for components like microcontrollers, memory, displays etc. More and more of this electronic have to be active all the time; in consequence, the need for power supplies with a "Low Iq" is growing rapidly, he said.
A low quiescent current of 22-microamps at an input voltage of 13.2V can maintain a 3.3V or 5.0V output voltage at room temperature and a switching frequency of 400kHz. The conversion efficiency is 92 percent at 0.75A and 87.5 percent at a rated current of 2A.
Davis finally mentions a product, the BD555BK, that address the general lighting market. This chip allows triac-based light dimmers installed for incandescent lighting to be used for LED lighting.
Next: next directions.
SiC, GaN, wireless charging, automotive IoT
Davis acknowledges that in general the EDC does not follow the full range of Rohm activities but tends to specialize in power and lighting applications in automotive and industrial sectors. These are also sectors where there are large customers in Europe and where it would be hard to gain design wins without having local applications engineering, said Davis.
Davis said his design team works with the BD, bipolar and DMOS, logic and power manufacturing process, and the designs then get manufactured at Rohm wafer fabs in Japan. "We don’t do anything in the digital domain although we do do some software."
Rohm has a Cortex-M0 license from ARM within Lapis Semiconductor as well as proprietary 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers and the EDC has some staff that provide local support helping to code applications for these MCUs, Davis explained.
And with EDC in a growth phase where is Davis looking to expand the remit.
"We have started a support activity for MEMS, although we would not develop MEMS devices ourselves," said Davis referencing the fact that Rohm is now offering MEMS foundry services (see Rohm opens MEMS foundry operation).
"High-powered systems based on silicon-carbide and gallium nitride, is one area and I believe that the Internet of Things is very important. Connectivity in automotive is going to be very important as well as technology for wireless charging."
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Rohm opens MEMS foundry operation
Rohm agrees to acquire Kionix, adds MEMS technology
Rohm Semiconductor opens European design center
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