TSMC Strengthens OIP Cloud Alliance with New Partner and New Solution Enablement

Speeding Up SoC Design in the Cloud with Enhanced Productivity

Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. – April 26, 2019 – TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today announced the expansion of the Open Innovation Platform ^® (OIP) Cloud Alliance, with Mentor joining inaugural members Amazon Web Services, Cadence, Microsoft Azure, and Synopsys. This expansion with new cloud-ready design solutions broadens TSMC’s OIP ecosystem and helps customers unleash innovations with TSMC process technologies.

Enabling New Cloud Solutions
Mentor is now certified for the TSMC Cloud Alliance, as Mentor’s process and procedures for protecting IP in the cloud have met TSMC’s standards. In addition, TSMC has validated that Mentor’s Calibre^® physical verification EDA solution can accelerate completion of verification runs by harnessing the scalability of the cloud. Through a joint project with Mentor, Microsoft Azure, and TSMC, a 5nm test chip from TSMC took less than four hours to complete its verification thanks to the productivity boost enabled by Calibre in the cloud. This performance demonstrates how the power of cloud computing, combined with TSMC know-how and our partners’ innovation, can provide mutual customers with additional options for optimizing tapeout schedules.

The Cloud Alliance also gains another solution with the Cadence^® CloudBurst^TM Platform. The CloudBurst Platform supports TSMC’s OIP VDE and enables customers to select critical parts of their EDA workload based on project needs to deploy to the cloud. It simplifies cloud adoption and boosts productivity with massive cloud computing power and fast, easy access to pre-installed Cadence design tools in a ready-to-use hybrid cloud environment running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. It is production-proven and has supported a successful customer tapeout on TSMC’s 7nm technology.

Leveraging the TSMC and Synopsys VDE collaboration, several partners and customers have accelerated their move to the cloud and have successfully completed designs on the cloud. eSilicon has been using their Synopsys-based implementation flow to build complex IP on the cloud targeting TSMC’s advanced technologies.

“More and more designers are adopting the cloud after TSMC pioneered the Cloud Alliance six months ago, and it is an exciting time to expand our partnerships further,” said Cliff Hou, vice president of Technology Development at TSMC. “We’ve seen customers of all sizes leveraging the cloud to boost productivity while designing in TSMC’s leading-edge technologies. Customers have taped out their 7nm products using solutions from our Cloud Alliance, and we have used it in our 5nm development to speed up memory, standard cell, and EDA design infrastructure deliveries to our customers. With the foundry segment’s most comprehensive cloud ecosystem, TSMC and its partners provide our customers with a competitive edge through optimized cloud-ready design solutions to bring their products to market sooner, with higher quality.”

Alliance Partner Quotes
“Customers have varying design requirements to consider as they migrate to the cloud, and Cadence recently expanded its industry-leading cloud portfolio with the new CloudBurst platform to address the complexities of hybrid cloud deployments. Through our long, close collaboration with TSMC, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, we’re jointly enabling customers to meet compressed schedule deadlines, increase throughput, and improve overall productivity. We’re continuing to see growing demand for cloud adoption, and the successful customer tapeouts to date are indicative of the transformative potential the cloud brings to the electronic design industry.”
-Dr. Anirudh Devgan, President, Cadence

“We at Mentor are happy to become a certified member of TSMC’s Cloud Alliance. Our Calibre platform has become a benchmark for scalability and runtime performance in both traditional and cloud configurations. This certification as a TSMC Cloud Alliance member will give our mutual customers more freedom to use best-in-class tools in whichever compute configuration they choose to use.”
-Joe Sawicki, Executive Vice President, Mentor IC Segment

“The deep cooperation between Microsoft and TSMC, with a shared vision of the cloud, has driven our joint innovation on technology components, engineering solutions and business models. At Microsoft we’ve seen the activity level of semiconductor design in the cloud increases significantly since the launch of the Cloud Alliance partnership. The most recent collaboration with Mentor enabling high scalability for customers’ IC design physical verification with massive cloud compute is yet another example of Azure’s commitment to accelerate digital transformation and adoption of the public cloud for the entire semiconductor industry.”
-Rani Borkar, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure

  “As an inaugural partner in 2018, we whole-heartedly support the TSMC Cloud Alliance and the OIP Virtual Design Environment. We are seeing increased adoption of cloud for EDA workloads, and are collaborating with TSMC and customers like eSilicon to drive this momentum. Additionally, we recently announced IC Validator NXT built with a massively parallel architecture designed specifically for cloud scalability and to support environments like VDE. ”
-Deirdre Hanford, Co-GM, Design Group, Synopsys