UMC joins the IPL Alliance

USA: The Interoperable PDK Libraries (IPL) Alliance announced that United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), a leading global semiconductor foundry in Taiwan, has joined the IPL Alliance, a standards organization whose charter is to establish an interoperable custom design ecosystem.

The addition of UMC to the IPL Alliance member roster demonstrates the increasing semiconductor foundry support for interoperable process design kits (iPDKs).

The IPL Alliance, which includes major electronic design automation (EDA), semiconductor and foundry companies, released the industry's first open standard for iPDKs in 2010. The iPDK standard is based on the OpenAccess database and uses standard languages and a unified architecture to enable interoperability among all EDA vendor tools.
Engineering teams need to develop only a single PDK for each process node which reduces development costs, shortens design cycles and provides designers with earlier access to advanced process technologies across multiple tools.

"UMC is pleased to join the IPL Alliance," said Shih Chin Lin, director of the IP development and Design Support division at UMC. "We serve a broad spectrum of customer design needs, and find that interoperability is consistently a top item among customers' PDK requests. By joining the IPL Alliance and adopting the iPDK standard, we are able to develop high quality, high-performance iPDKs with modern architectures. We will comprehensively support iPDK to cover all our process nodes, and are confident in its interoperability and performance to effectively serve our customers."

"The addition of UMC to our growing IPL Alliance member list demonstrates the momentum of the IPL Alliance and acceptance of the iPDK standard by the semiconductor foundries," said Jingwen Yuan, president of the IPL Alliance and strategic alliance manager at Synopsys. "We welcome the addition of UMC iPDKs to meet the increasing demand from customers."