the first to put trench power mosfets into production

In contrast to traditional bipolar-based BCD technology, modular BCD allows different voltage, fully-isolated IC cells to be monolithically integrated without the need for expensive epitaxy or high-temperature diffusion. The company's proprietary process takes advantage of cost-depreciated former DRAM fabs and cheaper 8in wafers, although Williams says that the company will scale to 12in if and when they become cheaper.

Williams, a pioneer in the field of modular BCD and the first to put trench power mosfets into production, discovered the value of ion implantation for electrical isolation, something that had previously only been done in DRAM fabs for retrograde wells. "In our chips, a 5V and 30V section don't even know they are on the same piece of silicon," explained Williams about the advantages of his ion implantation technique.

But Williams sees modular BCD as the key to unlocking various emerging opportunities, such as drivers for active matrix LED displays. "For these, everyone else needs to have two power supplies and two coils - one to input positive voltage to power the active matrix screen and the another with a negative voltage, because an LED needs both. We can produce positive and negative on the same chip and have invented a new circuit technique that is able to do it with one coil, instead of two. Not only does this represent a huge cost saving, but we are also getting 10% higher peak efficiency than any existing solution."