Chipworks
has sent us an interesting piece of art for December 2006, along with some
hot gossip. They believe the image that adorns this ASIC (used in an airbag
sensor application) is the coat of arms or emblem of Austria. This leads
the micro-forensic team at Chipworks to believe it comes from Infineon's
fab in Villach, Austria. For you chip art aficionados, the 0248 in the image
is a date code, indicating that the device was packaged the 48th week of
2002.
We could not get any more information on the chip because our contacts at Chipworks have been busy taking a close look at a mystery surrounding a new 65-nm device that may, or may not, have been made by Texas Instruments.
It seems that their tear-down lab has gotten inside the baseband processor
from a Nokia 2610 GSM handset -- a socket that's traditionally been filled
with TI silicon -- and uncovered an intriguing mystery. While the die marking
certainly shows that TI provided the mask set, there is clear evidence that
the device was fabricated by UMC. Chipworks bases this conclusion on their
recently-published analysis of the 65-nm processes used by UMC and Toshiba
to produce Xilinx's Virtex-5 FPGA twins. A close look reveals that the structure
of the Nokia device has significant similarities to the UMC-fabbed Xilinx
device. If confirmed, it's further evidence of an increasing trend for IDMs
to outsource certain products.