Elmos and SK keyfoundry expand their collaboration on 130nm technology

What it means for hiring

Elmos, the Leverkusen mixed-signal chip company, has extended its eighteen-year foundry relationship with SK keyfoundry from 350nm to a 130nm platform with deep-trench isolation, built for dense high-voltage designs, and has secured wafer capacity on it through 2037. The first product is a four-channel smart eFuse controller for zonal vehicle architectures, sampling now with series production in 2027, and the two companies plan an embedded flash cell for the same year.

A fabless automotive chip company signing for capacity eleven years out is telling you its product roadmap is long, and the roadmap is the hiring plan. Zonal architectures replace fuses and relays with semiconductor switches and software, so an eFuse controller needs analogue and high-voltage designers who understand wiring harness faults, and application engineers who can sit with a tier one's zonal controller team and explain what happens when a load shorts. The move to 130nm with deep-trench isolation also needs layout and device engineers who know that process, and they are a smaller pool than the people who simply know the node. Most experienced mixed-signal automotive designers in Germany already work for Infineon, NXP, Bosch or Elmos itself, and all four are hiring for the same architecture shift. The companies that fill these roles fastest will be the ones willing to take a strong power management designer from industrial or consumer work and teach them ISO 26262, rather than waiting for a CV that already has both.

Read the original at PCIM News Platform .