Innovation has always been an exciting and challenging proposition. Competition among semiconductor companies continues to intensify in the face of increasing industry consolidation and the commoditization of technology at more mature, conventional levels. Companies must find ways to keep innovating in order to survive and prosper. TSMC believes the most effective way to promote innovation in the semiconductor industry is through active collaboration with partners.

As the semiconductor industry continued to mature, process complexity and design complexity began to explode. Esoteric and subtle interactions between process technology, EDA, IP, and design methodology became more challenging to coordinate with a disaggregated supply chain. A substantial amount of coordination and communication was needed between the various parts of the ecosystem. A way to bring the various pieces closer together to foster better collaboration was needed. TSMC began this work nearly 15 years ago, when 45 nm was cutting edge, and developed the TSMC Open Innovation Platform^®, or OIP.

Today, TSMC OIP is a robust and vibrant ecosystem and enabling silicon innovations around world. The OIP initiative is a comprehensive design technology infrastructure that encompasses all critical IC implementation areas to lower design barriers and improve first-time silicon success. OIP promotes the speedy implementation of innovation amongst the semiconductor design community and its ecosystem partners using TSMC’s IP, design implementation, process technology, and backend services.

The infrastructure provided by TSMC paved the way for enhanced collaboration and coordination, which provides TSMC’s customers the best of both the monolithic and disaggregated models. It changed the trajectory of the semiconductor industry and enabled customers to achieve next-generation silicon designs with faster time-to-market.

Crucial to OIP are ecosystem interfaces and collaborative components initiated and supported by TSMC to empower innovation throughout the supply chain which, in turn, drive the creation and sharing of new revenue and profits. TSMC’s active accuracy assurance (AAA) initiative is key to OIP, providing the accuracy and quality required by the ecosystem interfaces and collaborative components. TSMC’s Open Innovation^® model brings together the creative thinking of customers and partners under the common goal of shortening each of the following: design time, time-to-volume, time-to-market and, ultimately, time-to-revenue. The model features:

Now TSMC’s OIP alliance consists of 18 EDA partners, six Cloud partners, 37 IP partners, 22 design center alliance (DCA) partners, and eight value chain aggregator (VCA) partners. TSMC and its partners work together proactively and engage much earlier and deeper than ever before in order to address mounting design challenges at advanced technology nodes. Through this early and intensive collaborative effort, TSMC’s OIP is able to deliver the needed design infrastructure with timely enhancement of EDA tools, early availability of critical IPs, and quality design services when customers need them. Taking full advantage of the process technologies once they reach production-ready maturity is critical to customers’ success. TSMC’s OIP partner management portal facilitates communication with its ecosystem partners for efficient business productivity. Designed with a highly intuitive interface, this portal can be accessed via a direct link from TSMC-Online™.

We look forward to the next phase of semiconductor growth and where it may take us. For now, we are guided by the belief that the new era of semiconductor is all about collaboration and will continue to enhance our design ecosystem to enable next-generation silicon design and innovations.