Analysis: Spansion sets sights on industrial mcu market

Gerhard Roos, pictured, vp of Spansion's analogue and microcontroller business group, said there were good reasons for the acquisition. "In terms of analogue," he said, "it's about drivers for leds and energy harvesting and power management ics. It's a business which fits well with microcontrollers, with a 1:1 sales ratio in many apps." While Fujitsu once developed and maintained its own microcontroller cores, the last three years has seen development effort centred on ARM cores. "The Cortex-R4, R5 and R7 cores are being used in mcus targeted at automotive applications," Roos noted. "But the Cortex-M family is being used in entry level mcus." Spansion, meanwhile, is on the way back from being close to closure. In 2009, following a long string of losses, the company put itself up for sale or merger and entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It got backing from a private equity company and a couple of fabs were sold. Now, Spansion appears to be in a much stronger position. Roos said: "We are looking to increase our industrial business and that's why we're adding more devices to our mcu range." Currently, the consumer and automotive markets represent about 70% of Spansion's business, with industrial contributing around 10%. In terms of technologies, flash is around 60% of sales, microcontrollers 30% and analogue about 5%. The latest launch is the FM0+ range, which will feature two variants: an entry level range running at 40MHz, with 6k of ram and either 56k or 88k of flash. It is also working on an ultra low power range, which will debut in the latter part of 2014. Meanwhile, the FM4 range, which features the Cortex-M4 core, will be beefed up, pushing the clock rate to 200MHz and the maximum amount of flash to 2Mbyte. The boost in performance will come from the use of a different process technology at Fujitsu, which remains the company's foundry. "We have access to 90nm performance and low leakage variants," Roos noted. "However, we're looking to move to smaller nodes." Because Spansion has its eyes on the industrial market, the mcus are specified accordingly. "Most devices are 5.5V tolerant," Roos pointed out. "This is important as many industrial apps were developed a while ago and are based on 5V supplies. But the industrial environment is also hostile and we want to reduce interference; there's a much better signal to noise ratio with a 5V supply." Now, the company wants to bring its charge trap flash technology to the embedded world. "We lead the market in charge trap flash," Roos asserted, "and the technology will find greater use in the next five to ten years. It has a better fit in the embedded world than floating gate technology. The memory cell shrinks well through the technology process nodes and should be applicable beyond the 20nm node. That's why we bought the Fujitsu business unit." Because the existing mcu range is Fujitsu designed, the devices feature Fujitsu's floating gate flash technology – developed in association with AMD. Fujitsu and AMD formed FASL, which turned into Spansion. "But we'll be moving to charge trap flash at the next node," Roos concluded.