EM Microelectronic
| EM Microelectronic Marin SA
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1975 |
| Seat |
Marin NE , Switzerland
|
| management | Michel Willemin |
| Branch | Watch industry , electronics industry |
| Website | EM Microelectronic Marin |
EM Microelectronic Marin SA (abbreviated often just called EM ) is a subsidiary of the Swatch Group , belongs to its Electronic Systems division and is its competence center for semiconductor circuits with the lowest power consumption for battery-operated wristwatches as well as for other applications. The company's headquarters are in Marin near Neuchâtel in Switzerland .
history
Ebauches Electroniques SA, Marin (then abbreviated to EEM) was founded during the so-called quartz crisis in 1975, because the newly launched electronic quartz wristwatches required integrated circuits ("chips") to divide the frequency generated by the clock quartz from 32.768 kHz down to seconds and to control a pointer display using a Lavet stepper motor or digital segment display. In order to be able to use the required CMOS technology quickly, a license was acquired from Hughes Aircraft in Southern California and the technology transfer was carried out in order to begin the production of such integrated circuits.
At that time, EEM was a subsidiary of the ASUAG group. After their merger with SSIH in 1983 to form the Société de Microélectronique et d'Horlogerie (SMH), the Swatch Group emerged in 1998 through a name change. Shortly after it was founded, in the 1970s, in addition to semiconductor production, a pilot line for the production of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) was set up in order to also be able to supply digital displays for corresponding wristwatches from the group. However, the Swiss watch industry withdrew from this segment of the watch market and largely left wristwatches with an exclusively digital display to the Asian competition.
In the meantime, the company, now called EM Microelectronic Marin, not only manufactures integrated circuits suitable for controlling LCDs, but also flexible LCDs in different colors as well as complete modules for installation in a series of SWATCH watches with digital displays, in particular the "SWATCH TOUCH" and the new models "TISSO Lady" and "Gent Solar"
EM has also manufactured electronic components for the Group's diversification projects and supplies third-party companies with application-specific circuits for battery-operated devices. Integrated circuits for local radio " Bluetooth " of the latest generation 5 are produced. Today, sales of components for the watch industry make up less than half, and diversification into other applications has been successful. In 2013, EM produced and sold over 1.27 billion integrated circuits.
Subsidiaries
- EM Microelectronic US, Inc. in Colorado Springs , State of Colorado , USA, serves the US market and has its own development department.
- ASICentrum sro in Prague , Czech Republic is a development center for turnkey, customer-specific solutions with digital, analog or combined integrated circuits.
Products
EM has its own production facilities for semiconductor components in Marin, but also uses external semiconductor factories ( wafer fabs ). A 0.18 micrometer manufacturing process is available as a cutting-edge technology for in-house production.
The products developed and manufactured include:
- Circuits for watches
- RFID circuits for wireless identification
- Circuits for chip cards
- Circuits for wireless communication at close range according to the Bluetooth standard, etc. a. as "System-on-a-Chip" for hearing aids
- LCD control circuits for passive matrix displays in multiplex operation
- Sensor chips for cell phones and optoelectronic PC mice
- Microcontroller
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Stefan Betschon: Faster, further. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 10, 2017, p. 58
- ↑ a b c d Swatch 2013 Annual Report
- ↑ a b c EM product overview
- ↑ flexible LCDs from EM ( Memento of the original from March 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Product overview from EM (en.) ( Memento of the original from March 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
