Less talk … more SoC action

The chairman of the world’s biggest foundry believes the system on chip revolution has, to date, been too much ‘talk’ and not enough action. In a rare press roundtable at December’s International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington, TSMC chairman Morris Chang said he believes the semiconductor industry has only scratched the surface of SoC’s potential for integration. He noted that aspects such as embedded memory were only just now beginning to appear – and in no great volume – in SoC designs and believes designers need to move more quickly. Chang, with more than 40 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, offered a number of other provocative observations and set out how TSMC aims to meet the challenges. He said ‘most’ of TSMC’s customers regard low power as more important than meeting the scaling challenges inherent in continuing the progress of Moore’s Law. He also reminded eda companies that it may not be in their best interest to guard the content of new tools closely with ‘power users’ for too long before releasing them to the wider market. “If you look at things in aggregate terms, you may well find that we are the eda industry’s biggest ‘power user’ of all and, obviously, we’d expect them to respect that,” he said. In return, Chang said TSMC will be more open in meeting demand for more custom variation within its process offerings. Indeed, Chang’s view is this will be vital if his company is to allow its customers to both overcome complexity and sufficiently differentiate their products. There will be limits – “I am not talking about 100 different processes for 100 different customers” – but TSMC says it is now looking for partnerships that extend further up the design flow. To this end, Chang said the foundry will be increasing the range of IP it supplies to users. The IP content within its Reference Flow design kits has already increased substantially in the last two generations.