Peter Clarke EE Times (03/02/2010 8:38 AM EST)

LONDON — With NXP shutting wafer fabs ICH in Hamburg, Germany and ICN5 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and announcing plans to close ICN6 by early-to-mid 2011 the fab-lite movement is gathering pace at the chip company.

And the conventional wisdom that fab-lite is a strategy that outsources leading-edge digital CMOS to avoid R&D and capital expenditure costs but keeps analog and mixed-signal IC manufacture in-house because design, performance and process are intimately linked, also seems to be going away at NXP.

Now that NXP has moved its digital television and set-top box businesses into Trident Microsystems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) — the deal closed on Feb. 8 — NXP has reduced its direct interest in digital ICs. But increasingly NXP is also coming to rely on outsourcing for its mixed-signal IC manufacturing.

According to senior executives at NXP the C14 mixed-signal process, which offers 140-nm minimum geometries, is likely to remain the work-horse internal process technology for the foreseeable future. NXP also designs to a 90-nm mixed-signal process it calls C90 for external manufacture and on occasion uses a 65-nm RF CMOS process that it labels C65, which is again a process that NXP cannot manufacture internally.

C14 might undergo a shrink or two down to 120-nm or 110-nm minimum geometries but will essentially remain the same for a number of years, executives said. At the same time is unlikely that NXP will bring the C90 or C65 processes in-house. More likely is the addition of options to extend NXP's high-performance mixed-signal process at above 100-nanometers.

"A large part of our applications fit very well on 140-nm," said Rene Penning de Vries, chief technology officer with NXP. "We are considering our next step to push the envelope," he added.

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