Imagination and TSMC strengthen technology collaboration

ENGLAND & TAIWAN: TSMC and Imagination Technologies have announced the next phase of their technology collaboration.

As part of this new phase of their relationship, Imagination will work closely with TSMC to develop highly optimised reference design flows and silicon implementations using Imagination's industry-leading PowerVR Series6 GPUs combined with TSMC's advanced process technologies, including 16-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology.

Imagination and TSMC R&D teams will also work together to create fully characterised reference system designs, utilizing high bandwidth memory standards and TSMC's 3D IC technology capability to demonstrate new levels of system performance and capabilities while retaining all the essential characteristics of power, silicon area and small package footprint demanded by high volume mobile SoCs.

As GPUs increasingly dominate the area, power and performance of next generation SoCs and the options available to designers using advanced silicon processes become more complex, design flows and libraries need to be optimally tuned to enable design teams to achieve the best possible performance, power consumption and silicon area in ever more demanding timescales.

To address these challenges, Imagination and TSMC are investigating how the characteristics of the latest processes, such as 16FinFET, influence the design of high performance IP-based SoCs.