San Jose, California-based Cypress SemicondCorp uctor has poached a number of designers from Sunnyvale-based Advanced Micro Devices Inc and the now defunct Cascade Micro Devices Inc to establish a unit specialising in high-speed BiCMOS circuits for use in data communications applications. Electronic News says that the unit is to be headed by Ronald Treadway, formerly Cascade’s vice-president of engineering, and before that, product line director for high-speed circuits at Advanced Micro Devices where he headed development of the Transparent Asynchronous Transceiver Interface devices for linking computers using analogue phase-locked loops. Treadway’s design team also includes three individuals who worked at Advanced Micro Devices and followed him to Cascade. Advanced Micro Devices responded to the loss of its design team with a lawsuit alleging misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of employment contracts. The company was quoted as saying that the departures were devastating and significantly damaging to its Transceiver Interface device programme. Cascade closed up shop in February this year and the suit was settled out of court. The super-ambitious Cypress Semiconductor is bucking the trend at the moment and seems to have embarked on a recruitment policy. It has established a design unit in Colorado Springs and recruited a 10-member design team from Inova Microelectronics Inc, now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. The site director is Ronald Bourassa, formerly senior vice-president and general manager of Inova, and he reports to Mike Powell, general manager of Cypress’ static random access memory group. Yet another recent hiring is Randu Vancu, formerly director of flash EpROM design at Seeq Technology Inc. BiCMOS technology combines a basic CMOS process with bipolar – usually ECL – islands on the chip for functions that are speed-critical in an attempt to get the best of both worlds – the low power consumption of CMOS and the high speed of ECL, which is hard to fabricate as densely as CMOS because it generates so much heat. BiCMOS chips are typically designed with CMOS levels off-chip so that they can be used with standard – and relatively cheap – CMOS support circuits.
