The existence of TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) program further sped up disaggregation of the semiconductor supply chain. Partly, this was enabled by the existence of a healthy EDA industry and an increasingly healthy IP industry. As chip designs had grown more complex and entered the system-on-chip (SoC) era, the amount… Read More
TSMC’s 16FinFET and 3D IC Reference Flows
Today TSMC announced three reference flows that they have been working on along with various EDA vendors (and ARM and perhaps other IP suppliers). The three new flows are:
- 16FinFET Digital Reference Flow. Obviously this has full support for non-planar FinFET transistors including extraction, quantized pitch placement, low-vdd
Intel Bay Trail Fail
Now that the IDF 2013 euphoria is fading I would like to play devil’s advocate and make a case for why Intel is still not ready to compete in the mobile market. It was very clear from the keynotes that Intel is a chip company, always has been, always will be, and that will not get them the market share they need to be relevant in mobile electronics,… Read More
Sidense and TSMC Processes
I’ve written before about the basic capabilities of Sidense’s single transistor one-time programmable memory products (1T-OTP). Just to summarize, it is an anti-fuse device that works by permanently rupturing the gate oxide under the bit-cells storage transistor, something that is obviously irreversible.… Read More
Analog Characterization Environment (ACE)
I’m looking forward to the 2013 TSMC Open Innovation Platform Ecosystem Forum to be held Oct. 1[SUP]st[/SUP] in San Jose. One paper in particular that has my attention is titled, “An Efficient and Accurate Sign-Off Simulation Methodology for High-Performance CMOS Image Sensors,” by Berkeley Design Automation & … Read More
TSMC OIP: Mentor’s 5 Presentations
At TSMC’s OIP on October 1st, Mentor Graphics have 5 different presentations. Collect the whole set!
11am, EDA track. Design Reliability with Calibre Smartfill and PERC. Muni Mohan of Broadcom and Jeff Wilson of Mentor. New methodologies were invented for 28nm for smart fill meeting DFM requirements (and at 20nm me may … Read More
TSMC OIP: Soft Error Rate Analysis
Increasingly, end users in some markets are requiring soft error rate (SER) data. This is a measure of how resistant the design (library, chip, system) is to single event effects (SEE). These manifest themselves as SEU (upset), SET (transient), SEL (latch-up), SEFI (functional interrupt).
There are two main sources that cause… Read More
Xilinx At 28nm: Keeping Power Down
Almost without exception these days, semiconductor products face strict power and thermal budgets. Of course there are many issues with dynamic power but one big area that has been getting increasingly problematic is static power. For various technical reasons we can no longer reduce the voltage as much as we would like from one… Read More
A Brief History of TSMC OIP
The history of TSMC and its Open Innovation Platform (OIP) is, like almost everything in semiconductors, driven by the economics of semiconductor manufacturing. Of course ICs started 50 years ago at Fairchild (very close to where Google is headquartered today, these things go in circles). The planarization approach, whereby… Read More
The TSMC OIP Technical Paper Abstracts are up!
The TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Ecosystem Forum brings TSMC’s design ecosystem member companies together to share with our customers real-case solutions for customers’ design challenges and success stories of best practice in TSMC’s design ecosystem.
More than 90% of the attendees last year said “this… Read More

