Our company

Bruco Integrated Circuits is a fabless design center focusing on RF IC and Analog/Mixed-signal IC design and RF Power application design. We provide design services and turn-key solutions from early system specification to qualified silicon and take care of the supply chain during product lifetime.

Our designs can be found in many products close to home like, mobile phones, lighting, industry, cars, and personal entertainment.

Our team of highly skilled people consists of over thirty IC design and application engineers with Bachelor, Master and PhD degrees with various backgrounds.

Bruco IC has a design office and RF measurement laboratory in Borne (HQ), the Netherlands, a design office in Nijmegen, the Netherlands and a design office in Berlin, Germany.

We have created ASICs like

• Eight-input phased-array satellite RF front-ends and the accompanying antenna board
  
• Tile drivers for 11 million MEMS mirrors on a single 4×2cm die
  
• LED driver ASICs able to dim to very low light levels and which are wirelessly controllable
  
• Automotive IC’s like body controllers, CAN bus transceivers and alternator voltage regulators
  

These ASICs are examples of our diverse projects requiring the best of our highly skilled experts; not only of their technical abilities but also of their flexibility, cooperation and communication. Our project teams consist of a mix of system, RF, analogue, digital and application engineers. You will find a high degree of freedom and flexibility within your project team in which everyone is respected for their skill, work and responsibilities.

Assignments 

JTAG boundary scan study

This study will try to tackle one or two of the drawback of the JTAG boundary scan, namely the higher design effort and potentially, a second drawback can be tackled as well, reduce the extra pin count by sharing the JTAG pins with a SPI interface.

Design of a charge pump

This design will consist out of several parts. You are looking into the theory and behavior modelling of charge pumps, compare different architectures and, of course, implement the best one in a certain IC process. If needed only one or two parts will be carried out.

Design of a Linear Low Noise IF Amplifier

For an ultra linear and broadband RF receiver test chip, developed at bruco, we have difficulties determining the realized noise figure and distortion. The receiver chip outputs 2 quadrature IF signals differentially that should not be loaded when measured. This is a challenge as most sensitive measurement equipment is designed to operate in 50 Ohm single-ended. In this assignment you are going to investigate the different options to tackle this measurement challenge.

Design of an optimal pre-distortable RF PA

In stead of trying to design an amplifier that is almost linear enough to process the modern wireless signals and apply DPD techniques to it, you are investigating the possibility to optimize the design to fit easy pre-distortion.

Improve the design of an LDO

A low dropout (LDO) regulator is one of the most basis building blocks in a electronic design. In this assignment you are going to investigate the possibility to optimize the LDO design w.r.t. load variation and the relation to bias current usage.

Implementation of an Automatic Design Partitioning Script

In RF IC design, the performance of the design is often significantly depending on the layout parasitics. For finding the capacitance between traces or trace to substrate and also the resistance between connections, it is common to use extraction software that generates a new netlist including the parasitics of interest. For RF design not only the Capacitance and resistance is important, but also the inductance. For this an Electro-Magnetic (EM) simulator is used. Compared to the more standard RC extraction tools, that can handle all design layers and will even recognize active devices, the EM simulator can only be used for the back-end metal stack. In this assignment the preparation of the layout for such an EM simulator, with scripting is investigated.

Measuring passive RF devices

After design and fabrication an IC must be evaluated on the bench. In this assignment you are going to investigate how to measure an IC that generates very low harmonic power without increasing the input power, as this will damage the IC.

About you

You are a highly motivated student, eager, interested in cutting edge technologies for the world of tomorrow and want to experience how it is to be part of a highly skilled team in an ic-design company. When applying please indicate in which topic you are interested.