Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
BOX 4-1
MOSIS
The Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS) was estab-
lished in 1981 as a low-cost prototyping and small-volume production service for
VLSI circuit development. MOSIS accepts designs from commercial firms, govern-
ment agencies, and research and educational institutions around the world. It inte-
grates user designs for a common process onto a single mask set, supplies the
mask set to commercial foundries for fabrication, dices the finished wafers, and
ships the individual dies to their corresponding requestors. This approach spreads
the mask-making and fabrication costs among many users to make cost-effective
fabrication of prototype chips possible. A single mask set can cost $50,000 and up,
depending on the minimum line feature size and number of layers required. A 2.2-
mm-square “tiny chip” fabricated using a 1.5-micrometer CMOS process costs
only $1,080 for five copies. This low-cost fabrication service is ideal for students
and researchers who need only a few copies of a given design or need to verify
their designs before they enter mass production. MOSIS stimulates creativity in
semiconductor circuit design and in related fields such as CMOS-compatible
MEMS by offering a low-cost prototyping service. Figure 4-1-1 shows a sample
detector die for a nano/picosatellite sun sensor fabricated as a “tiny chip.” MOSIS
currently offers CMOS fabrication with 1.5-, 0.5-, 0.35-, 0.25-, and 0.18-micron
processes from various vendors, 0.5- and 0.25-micron SiGe BiCMOS processes,
a 0.5-micron silicon-on-insulator process, and a 0.2-micron GaAs process. See
<http://www.mosis.org> for more information.
FIGURE 4-1-1 Two-dimensional active pixel sensor array. Photograph courtesy
of the Aerospace Corporation.
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