Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today announced the release of the semiconductor industry's first interoperable process design kit (iPDK) for advanced technology. The kit is fully validated on TSMC's 65 nanometer (nm) process and represents the newest design initiative to come from the company's Open Innovation Platform™, focusing on enhancing innovation in custom, analog, mixed-signal and RF designs.
TSMC unified iPDK works across multiple OpenAccess™-based EDA design environments, eliminating the need for multiple proprietary PDKs, and enabling full reuse of design data between different custom IC design toolsets. The iPDK initiative is supported by all major EDA vendors including Cadence, Magma, Mentor, Springsoft, Synopsys, and others. The first iPDK in 65nm was developed in collaboration with TSMC development partners, Synopsys and Ciranova, and QA/validation partners, Magma and Springsoft. Its interoperable approach improves design accuracy, shortens design cycle times, promotes design reuse, and improves return on design investment.
“The iPDK is a long-awaited solution to many of the design problems that have delayed new technology and tool adoption. Multiple and/or incompatible PDKs on proprietary custom design databases have limited design reuse and portability, and has resulted in high development, maintenance and support costs for all ecosystem partners including TSMC,” explains ST Juang, senior director of design infrastructure marketing at TSMC. “The interoperable design kit will enable higher level of innovation and differentiation for our customers in full custom, analog, and mixed-signal designs.”
TSMC iPDK is based on the OpenAccess database and data model. It features open standard languages, Tcl and Python, for parameterized layout cells, callbacks, and technology files and includes unified views of symbols. The modern and flexible architecture easily accommodates specific customizations, future feature extensions and advanced and differentiated development. Customers will be able to extend the iPDK in the languages supported by the custom design tools of their choice. The iPDK also includes SKILL™ callbacks and component description format (CDF) files to provide compatibility with current OpenAccess-based PDKs and Cadence IC6.1 environment. TSMC continues to collaborate closely with key EDA partners to ensure full interoperability between the new TSMC iPDK and the currently available PDKs
The new TSMC iPDK's single interoperable data model and highly productive development infrastructure enables new iPDKs to be developed quickly and with consistent quality, and be available earlier for advanced process technology nodes. TSMC iPDK's interoperability with multiple EDA tools and design flows remove design tool and flow adoption barrier, and offer customers more choices of design tools. The result is faster adoption of tools and flow that accelerate time-to-design-start for custom analog, mixed signal and RF designs.
TSMC iPDK unified data model on industry-standard OpenAccess database enables design reuse that is not possible with multiple proprietary PDKs and design databases. It eliminates duplicate PDK development efforts, significantly reduces PDK development, validation and support costs across the design ecosystem, and promotes innovation in analog and full custom design.
Pricing and Availability
The TSMC 65nm iPDK will be available July 2009 in limited release and at no charge to selected customers. General release to other customers is targeted for Q4 2009. Customers may access the 65nm iPDK at the TSMC Online customer design portal http://online.tsmc.com/online/ or contact their local sales and support representatives for details.
TSMC's Open Innovation Platform™
TSMC's Open Innovation Platform™ promotes timeliness-driven innovation amongst the semiconductor design community, its ecosystem partners and TSMC's IP, design implementation and DFM capabilities, process technology and backend services. The Open Innovation Platform includes a set of ecosystem interfaces and collaborative components initiated and supported by TSMC that efficiently empower innovation throughout the supply chain and enables the sharing of newly-created revenue and profitability. TSMC's Active Accuracy Assurance initiative is critical to the Open Innovation Platform, providing the accuracy and quality required in ecosystem interfaces and collaborative components.