TSMC and Microsoft collaborate to foster the production of wafer products

Thursday, 04 October 2018 at 09:57

Earlier in 2018, the Open Innovation Platform Ecology Forum announced that TSMC has joined forces with Microsoft to initiate the Open Innovation Platform Virtual Design Environment (OIP VDE) and announced the establishment of the OIP Cloud Alliance. This was done to provide a more efficient wafer design environment for the semiconductor industry. By combining the Microsoft Azure cloud service platform, TSMC will be able to design a system-on-a-chip (SoC) through cloud platform collaboration through its open innovation platform virtual design environment for quick production.

For example, SiFive, a startup chip design company has partnered with Yihua Computer to create a 64-bit multi-core open source code set architecture (Multi-Core RISC-V CPU) from SiFive and implement the RISC-V Linux system environment. The U540, the first high-end processor in the Freedom Unleashed series, was built with this design environment, and it also means that the Microsoft Azure cloud platform is quite stable and reliable.

At the same time, based on Azure's open, secure and expanded features, it can also be widely used in various automation software design and wafer development applications. TSMC also cooperated with Microsoft to form the OIP Cloud Alliance, which is expected to be available in the Microsoft Azure cloud service in the future. The RTL-to-GDSII, whic TSMC

h supports digital circuit design on the platform, and the process validation of the system's single-chip logic framework (Schematic Capture) are expected to continue to drive the benefits of a broader and more efficient semiconductor design. In addition to working with Microsoft, TSMC also works with Amazon's AWS cloud service platform, as well as more cloud service providers to promote the OIP Cloud Alliance.