IP/foundry pacts proliferate

Electronic News, March 16, 1998 by Dylan McGrath

TSMC, UMC Enter Separate Intellectual Property Accords

Silicon Valley--Two of the semiconductor industry's largest dedicated silicon foundries, both based in Taiwan, signed agreements with intellectual property (IP) vendors based here last week. While Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) contracted with San Jose, Calif.-based Artisan Components to create memories, standard cells and I/O for its 0.25-micron logic process, United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) entered into a multi-year joint development agreement with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Virtual Silicon Technologies.

There are glaring differences between the two agreements. In the TSMC/Artisan deal, TSMC is licensing the IP directly from Artisan and offering it to its foundry customers exclusively. The UMC/Virtual Silicon deal is really a joint marketing agreement; Virtual Silicon will sell IP that is compatible with UMC processes to customers. Under terms of the latter agreement, UMC is endorsing Virtual Silicon's Diplomat-25 design rules, but the technology will be portable to other foundries, giving customers the option of shopping around.

Despite the obvious differences in the structure of the deals and the relationships of the companies involved, both announcements highlight IP's growing importance in the eyes of foundry customers. Roger Fisher of TSMC USA's office of the president said both announcements illustrate the value of having foundry-ready IP available to customers to plug into their designs, something he said can save OEMs between three and seven months in time-to-market. "I think deals like this will probably become more the rule than the exception," he said.

"I think the pure-play foundries are beginning to offer, directly to their customers, libraries that are attuned to their process," said Jeff Lewis, Artisan VP of marketing. "They have invested millions of dollars to fine tune their processes, so they want to make sure that their customers have access to libraries which are compatible."

Cites Usefulness

"I don't think there is any question that these types of relationships are useful," said Robert Strain, director of foundry technology for National Semiconductor. Mr. Strain added that large integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) like National Semiconductor would be far less likely to need third-party IP than many small start-up companies. "If you start to get into some of the classical fabless semiconductor houses, particularly the smaller ones, I think they have a lot to gain by having a cell library available and guaranteed for them to use," he said.

Although financial details of the TSMC/Artisan deal were not clear, TSMC said it purchased Artisan's Process-Perfect HS300 (high-speed 300MHz) single--and dual-port memory generators and Process-Perfect Standard Cell libraries. Artisan tuned the product to TSMC's 0.25-micron process, allowing the memory generators to create a variety of embedded memories that Artisan said can operate at system speeds of at least 300MHz.

"These IP components are the foundation for every logic IC design," said Ping Yang, TSMC VP of corporate marketing. "By making them part of our offering and verifying and qualifying them in silicon, we are reducing our customers' time and expense to begin their designs and accelerating their time-to-market."

According to TSMC, the agreement with Artisan represents an important step in the company's overall IP initiative, designed to shorten OEMs' product development cycles by facilitating the availability of process optimized, silicon verified IP components and cores.

"Customers are looking more and more toward us to deliver libraries which have all these components and deliver them in a way that will provide them with a maximum benefit," Mr. Fisher said. "At 0.25-micron, we will offer our customers a library which will probably allow them to implement 70 to 80 percent of a chip. Even if a customer has made a decision to not create its own library, it still typically will go through a rigorous evaluation of third party vendors."

Artisan supplies IP to some of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers. The company's client list is impressive, including blue-chip corporations such as NEC Corp., Fujitsu, Hitachi, Oki Semiconductor, SGS-Thompson, IBM and LSI Logic. Although Artisan last year agreed to provide Chartered Semiconductor with an SRAM IP, Mr. Lewis said this new deal makes TSMC Artisan's largest dedicated foundry customer. "This is fairly unique for us with TSMC," he said. "This is the first time we have done such a broad-scale deal with a pure-play foundry."

Different-Type Accord

The UMC/Virtual Silicon deal is a joint marketing and technology development agreement. Chip designers utilizing UMC's 0.25-micron manufacturing processes will be able to embed large IP cores into their system-on-silicon designs using Virtual Silicon's Diplomat-25 standard cell libraries. The two companies will collaborate on developing test chips to derive key reliability data, establish timing correlation and verify IP cores. This partnership aims to assure continuous library implementation and consistent silicon processes in current and future technologies.