Spansion Inc. was an American-based company that designed, developed, and manufactured flash memory, microcontrollers, mixed-signal and analog products, and system-on-chip (SoC) solutions.[1][2] The company had more than 3,700 employees in 2014 and was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Spansion was a joint-venture between AMD and Fujitsu.[3]
In August 2013, Spansion closed the acquisition of the Microcontroller and Analog Business of Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited.[4]
Spansion had more than 10,000 customers worldwide. Its products were used in the following markets: automotive electronics, home appliances, peripheral computing equipment, consumer equipment, industrial, and networking.[1]
History
Spansion was founded in 1993 as a joint venture between AMD and Japan's Fujitsu Ltd. Spansion was formerly known as FASL LLC.[5] Once AMD took control of the company in 2003, it was renamed Spansion LLC in June 2004[5] and officially spun off as an independent maker of flash memory chips in December 2005.[6][7]
After joining the company in 2009, CEO, John Kispert, brought Spansion out of bankruptcy with over $1 billion in sales and 10,000 customers worldwide. In 2013, Spansion purchased Fujitsu's microcontroller and analog business for $175 million, expanding Spansion's work force by more than 1,000 worldwide.
Mergers and acquisitions
In October 2007, Spansion announced that it was acquiring Israel-based Saifun Semiconductors Ltd., non-volatile memory provider. The companies signed an agreement that consolidated all MirrorBit and NROM IP, design and manufacturing expertise within Spansion. As a result, Spansion expanded its IP portfolio and enabled its immediate entry into the technology licensing business.[8][9] The acquisition closed on March 18, 2008.[8][9]
In April 2013, Spansion announced that it would acquire the Microcontroller and Analog Business of Fujitsu Semiconductor for approximately $110 million and approximately $65 million for inventory.[10] Spansion closed the acquisition deal in August 2013.
In December 2014, Cypress Semiconductor merged with Spansion in an all-stock deal worth $1.59 billion. Shareholders of each side will own about 50 percent of the new company, which will keep the name of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. The companies valued the deal at $4 billion. They expected it to close in the first half of 2015 and to cut annual costs by $135 million within three years. Cypress President and CEO TJ Rodgers was the CEO of the combined company, which was expected to have $2 billion in annual revenue. Spansion Chairman Ray Bingham was the non-executive chairman.
Products
A Spansion 128 Megabit Flash Memory with 110 nm MirrorBit Process TechnologySpansion Traveo ARM-.Evaluation-Board
Spansion's product portfolio offers NOR densities ranging from four-megabit to eight-gigabits, NAND densities ranging from one-gigabit to eight-gigabits and an array of interfaces and features.[1] It has developed two flash memory technologies, single-bit-per-cell floating gate technology and one-, two- or more-bit-per-cell MirrorBit technology, with MirrorBit products based on two-bits per cell and allowing offering a range of product configurations.[1] The Company's products based on NOR flash memory architecture are designed for code storage and execution, and utilize either traditional floating gate technology or its MirrorBit technology.[1]
Spansion's NOR and NAND offering was targeted at embedded applications such as automotive, industrial and telecommunications.[11]
Spansion concentrates on the embedded electronics market. Its Floating Gate and MirrorBit technology was used to make networking and telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, gaming equipment, TV set-top control boxes, automotive equipment and personal computer peripherals.[12]
The company's NOR products offer designers the option to choose from 5V, 3V and 1.8V products that range from 1Mb to 2Gb.NAND products offer 3V and 1.8V products that range from 1Gb to 8 Gb.
Spansion's standard parallel NOR flash includes Spansion's MirrorBit NOR GL, AL AS, CD-CL, F, JL, PL, NS/VS/XS and WS families of flash memory. The products operate anywhere at 1.8 to 5.0 volts (Vcc), feature a random read speed of 90-100 nanoseconds (ns) access and offer a page read speed of 25 ns via an 8-word page buffer.[13]
Spansion's serial peripheral interface (SPI) devices read information serially, or one bit at a time, requiring fewer connections and pins, allowing for lower costs and simplified board layouts.[14] Serial flash memory is used in applications such as high-end printers, FPGAs, networking equipment and set-top boxes.[15]
The Spansion SPI FL family of serial flash memory: Densities for the SPI flash memory devices range from 4 Mb to 1 Gb with uniform 4KB uniform 64KB and uniform 256KB (128Mb – 1Gb FL-S) sectors and 4 Mb with parameter sectors.[16]
Spansion developed the HyperFlash NOR memory devices, based on the HyperBus interface. The family features read throughput of up to 333 megabytes per second—more than five times faster than ordinary Quad SPI flash currently available with one-third the number of pins of parallel NOR flash. Spansion HyperFlash memory devices provide a migration path—from single Quad SPI to Dual Quad SPI to HyperFlash Memory—allowing system applications to be scaled to different levels of flash performance when paired with compatible controllers, giving OEMs the ability to offer different product models with a single design.[17]
In August 2011, Spansion announced that it had created the first single-die, 4-gigabit NOR product implemented at the 65-nm node.
In 2013 Spansion acquired the Fujitsu microcontroller and analog business, including 8- 16- and 32-bit microcontroller families.
Spansion's FM MCU microcontroller family, which was based on the ARM Cortex-M4, M3, M0+ CPUs comes in packages from 32 to 216 pins, with flash memory densities between 56KB and 2MB. The Spansion Traveo microcontrollers are based on the ARM Cortex-R5 core and the first series in the Traveo family, MB9D560, operate at 200MHz.[18]
Spansion also acquired power management ICs aimed at energy harvesting and LED lighting.[19] The Buck PMIC for solar and vibrations energy harvesting MB39C811regulates output voltage with the quiescent current of 1.5µA. The Boost PMIC for solar and thermal energy harvesting MB39C831. Spansion's Easy DesignSim was a comprehensive online design support tool for LED Driver Circuit designers.
Manufacturing
Spansion had its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The company's main wafer fabrication facility, known as Fab 25, was in Austin, Texas.[20] The company also operated a final-manufacturing facility, in Bangkok, Thailand. In Penang, Malaysia, the company had a design center to focus on providing design, layout, CAD and verification services and to support to cross-site design centers.
Financial
At the end of Q2 2014, Spansion reported results for its second fiscal quarter; the company reported both GAAP and non-GAAP results due to the impact of fresh start accounting. On a U.S. GAAP basis, Spansion reported net sales of $314.7 million, a 61.3% year-over-year increase. On a non‑GAAP basis, gross margin was 33.2%, operating income was $22.1 million and net income was $15.6 million.[21]
Emergence from Chapter 11
After filing a motion with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware,[22] in April 2010, Spansion won court approval of its plan to exit bankruptcy and was allowed to reorganize the company.[23]
On May 10, 2010, Spansion emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Its old common stock was previously deemed to be impaired and then cancelled; the company issued new shares to those to whom it owed money.[24] The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on June 22, 2010 under the ticker symbol "CODE."[25]
Executive pay controversy
John Kispert was named CEO in February 2009, a month before the company's Chapter 11 filing.[7] It was understood that Kispert walked into a "no-win situation," according to the local media.[7]
With the company in turmoil and needing to reduce expenses,[7] Spansion laid off 3,000 employees without severance pay on February 23, 2009. Kispert was given a compensation package that could pay a $1.7 million bonus if he successfully found a buyer for the company or liquidated the company within six months.[26] Kispert never saw this bonus since he opted to file bankruptcy[7] in March 2009.[27] Managers received an 11% increase in pay, negating the effect of an earlier 10% salary cut.[28] The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 1, 2009, amid growing anger of former employees.[29][30]
In 2010, a settlement was reached on behalf of former employees of Spansion Inc. whose employment was terminated on or around February 23, 2009.[31] Kispert also instituted a policy of offering any new jobs first to the employees who were fired in 2009.[7]
Related Research Articles
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.
A microcontroller or microcontroller unit (MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of ferroelectric RAM, NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a small amount of RAM. Microcontrollers are designed for embedded applications, in contrast to the microprocessors used in personal computers or other general purpose applications consisting of various discrete chips.
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use the same cell design, consisting of floating gate MOSFETs. They differ at the circuit level depending on whether the state of the bit line or word lines is pulled high or low: in NAND flash, the relationship between the bit line and the word lines resembles a NAND gate; in NOR flash, it resembles a NOR gate.
Atmel Corporation was a creator and manufacturer of semiconductors before being subsumed by Microchip Technology in 2016. Atmel was founded in 1984. The company focused on embedded systems built around microcontrollers. Its products included microcontrollers radio-frequency (RF) devices including Wi-Fi, EEPROM, and flash memory devices, symmetric and asymmetric security chips, touch sensors and controllers, and application-specific products. Atmel supplies its devices as standard products, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or application-specific standard product (ASSPs) depending on the requirements of its customers.
Renesas Electronics Corporation is a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, initially incorporated in 2002 as Renesas Technology, the consolidated entity of the semiconductor units of Hitachi and Mitsubishi excluding their dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) businesses, to which NEC Electronics merged in 2010, resulting in a minor change in the corporate name and logo to as it is now.
Cypress Semiconductor was an American semiconductor design and manufacturing company. It offered NOR flash memories, F-RAM and SRAM Traveo microcontrollers, PSoC programmable system-on-chip solutions, analog and PMIC Power Management ICs, CapSense capacitive touch-sensing controllers, Wireless BLE Bluetooth Low-Energy and USB connectivity solutions.
CompactRISC is a family of instruction set architectures from National Semiconductor. The architectures are designed according to reduced instruction set computing principles, and are mainly used in microcontrollers. The subarchitectures of this family are the 16-bit CR16 and CR16C and the 32-bit CRX.
Alchemy is a family of ultra low power embedded microprocessors originally designed by Alchemy Semiconductor for communication and media devices. Alchemy processors are SoCs integrating a CPU core, a memory controller, and a varying set of peripherals. All members of the family use the Au1 CPU core implementing the MIPS32 instruction set by MIPS Technologies.
Atmel ARM-based processors are microcontrollers and microprocessors integrated circuits, by Microchip Technology, that are based on various 32-bit ARM processor cores, with in-house designed peripherals and tool support.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is transistor density.
Microchip Technology Incorporated is a publicly listed American corporation that manufactures microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog, and Flash-IP integrated circuits. Its products include microcontrollers, Serial EEPROM devices, Serial SRAM devices, embedded security devices, radio frequency (RF) devices, thermal, power and battery management analog devices, as well as linear, interface and wireless products.
Charge trap flash (CTF) is a semiconductor memory technology used in creating non-volatile NOR and NAND flash memory. It is a type of floating-gate MOSFET memory technology, but differs from the conventional floating-gate technology in that it uses a silicon nitride film to store electrons rather than the doped polycrystalline silicon typical of a floating-gate structure. This approach allows memory manufacturers to reduce manufacturing costs five ways:
Fewer process steps are required to form a charge storage node
Smaller process geometries can be used
Multiple bits can be stored on a single flash memory cell
Improved reliability
Higher yield since the charge trap is less susceptible to point defects in the tunnel oxide layer
SONOS, short for "silicon–oxide–nitride–oxide–silicon", more precisely, "polycrystalline silicon"—"silicon dioxide"—"silicon nitride"—"silicon dioxide"—"silicon", is a cross sectional structure of MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), realized by P.C.Y. Chen of Fairchild Camera and Instrument in 1977. This structure is often used for non-volatile memories, such as EEPROM and flash memories. It is sometimes used for TFT LCD displays. It is one of CTF (charge trap flash) variants. It is distinguished from traditional non-volatile memory structures by the use of silicon nitride (Si3N4 or Si9N10) instead of "polysilicon-based FG (floating-gate)" for the charge storage material. A further variant is "SHINOS" ("silicon"—"hi-k"—"nitride"—"oxide"—"silicon"), which is substituted top oxide layer with high-κ material. Another advanced variant is "MONOS" ("metal–oxide–nitride–oxide–silicon"). Companies offering SONOS-based products include Cypress Semiconductor, Macronix, Toshiba, United Microelectronics Corporation and Floadia.
In electronics, a multi-level cell (MLC) is a memory cell capable of storing more than a single bit of information, compared to a single-level cell (SLC), which can store only one bit per memory cell. A memory cell typically consists of a single floating-gate MOSFET, thus multi-level cells reduce the number of MOSFETs required to store the same amount of data as single-level cells.
Read-only memory (ROM) is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be electronically modified after the manufacture of the memory device. Read-only memory is useful for storing software that is rarely changed during the life of the system, also known as firmware. Software applications for programmable devices can be distributed as plug-in cartridges containing ROM.
LPC is a family of 32-bit microcontroller integrated circuits by NXP Semiconductors. The LPC chips are grouped into related series that are based around the same 32-bit ARM processor core, such as the Cortex-M4F, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M0+, or Cortex-M0. Internally, each microcontroller consists of the processor core, static RAM memory, flash memory, debugging interface, and various peripherals. The earliest LPC series were based on the Intel 8-bit 80C51 core. As of February 2011, NXP had shipped over one billion ARM processor-based chips.
GigaDevice Semiconductor is a Chinese NOR flash memory designer. It also produces microcontrollers, some of them are based on the ARM architecture, and other on the RISC-V architecture. GD32 chips were introduced in 2015 and are compatible in pinout and periphery options to the STM32 line of microcontrollers.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
