Advanced Analogic Technologies Inc (AnalogicTech) is planning to diversify its product offering and a not-so secret weapon in the form of a proprietary bipolar-CMOS-DMOS process - referred to as modular BCD - which accounts for 30% of the company's revenue at present.

Modular BCD is currently used to make battery chargers and LED backlight drivers for mobile phones and other consumer electronic devices, such as GPS navigation devices and netbooks. AnalogicTech's president, CEO and CTO Richard Williams stated: "The notebook market was dominated by Maxim but the mobile internet device market requires an entirely new architecture, it is actually more like a cell phone than a notebook. So we are developing products that go after netbooks that will aggressively compete against Maxim's position."

TVs represent another sizeable opportunity for AnalogicTech that can be captured using modular BCD. According to Williams: "We'll offer best in class LED backlight drives that can power up to 2500 LEDs. Our drivers will allow the system to change the backlight of each tile [of LEDs] by over a million levels of brightness, thanks to 8 bits of current control and 12 bits of pulse width time. This will enable display manufacturers to test and adjust the brightness of all the tiles so that they look alike." Precisely, this means that manufacturers will be able to use 5-cent LEDs, instead of 50-cent ones, says Williams.

At the same time, power consumption of TVs could also be reduced if the LEDs are illuminated or dimmed according to the image being shown. As Williams explains: "Our drivers will allow you to save up to one sixth of the current than if you were to illuminate the TV using full brightness all the time, as is the case with CCFL backlights today." The drivers have the ability to adjust every string of LEDs according to brightness, current and delay, and on a frame by frame basis, although Williams notes that the benefit of these capabilities won't be fully realised until beyond 2011.

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 OLED 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 OLED 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."