Celebrating 15 Years of Innovation Enabled by OIP Ecosystem Collaboration

We remember 2008 like it was yesterday. It was the year that 40nm was the most advanced node on the market, and it was also the year that TSMC Founder Dr. Morris Chang introduced the Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) to the world. This move created an entirely new paradigm of collaboration, bringing together the creative thinking of customers and design partners with a common goal of shortening the time between an idea in an innovator’s head and a product in the consumers’ hands.

“We are pleased to congratulate TSMC on the 15-year anniversary of OIP. The strong partnership between Arm and TSMC has fundamentally advanced the industry, delivering computing innovation across markets like mobile, infrastructure, automotive and IoT,” said Rene Haas, CEO, Arm. “We look forward to continuing our work together to address the complex compute challenges and demands that the next generation of AI accelerated workloads will bring, from the cloud to the edge."

The goal of the TSMC OIP was to handle the increasing complexity of semiconductor design by organizing development and optimization across process technology, electronic design automation (EDA), IP, and design methodology. Collaboration through OIP allows access to TSMC technology during early development phases, enabling parallel development with partners and customers. Through closer and deeper collaboration, we could profoundly impact time to market and change the trajectory of the entire industry.

As the industry’s most comprehensive design ecosystem, TSMC’s OIP has grown tremendously over the past 15 years. Our IP Alliance, for example, is one of six OIP alliances and has grown from 25 partners to 39. Those partners have been working closely with TSMC to expand IPs from 1,500 to more than 70,000, covering TSMC’s technologies from .25um to 2nm, and supporting a wide range of applications.

“For 15 years, Cadence and TSMC have transformed Moore’s law, bringing the possibility horizon closer with technology advancements like 3D IC and AI accelerated design flows,” said Dr. Anirudh Devgan, President and CEO of Cadence. “As we look ahead to the N2/N3 era, we’re excited to accelerate a partnership that is shaping the future of the semiconductor industry.”

Today, we have over 110 partners across six alliance programs to collaborate and innovate with, helping customers navigate design challenges from leading-edge logic processes to advanced 3D IC chip stacking solutions, to specialty technologies such as analog, RF (radio frequency), and silicon photonics. The close partnership we have mutually developed has helped our customers to surmount formidable technology barriers to create innovative products that have changed the world. Some of these OIP partners are global corporations and household names, while others are specialists in highly specific niches. We are grateful to all of them for their partnership.

“As a long-standing partner and a charter member of TSMC OIP, Siemens is delighted to join in celebrating 15 years of remarkable success and innovation fostered by this world-class ecosystem,” stated Joe Sawicki, Executive Vice President and General Manager of IC-EDA at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Throughout our enduring collaboration, Siemens and TSMC have shaped countless innovations spanning the complete spectrum of TSMC’s cutting-edge process nodes. These innovations have brought immense value to our extensive network of shared customers. Siemens remains resolute in our commitment to openness and partnership for our mutual customers in the years ahead.”

But the story doesn’t stop there. As our customers continue to push the wheel of progress forward through applications in generative AI, HPC, mobile, autonomous vehicles, and more, we launched the 3DFabric Alliance in 2022 to drive memory, substrate, testing, manufacturing, and packaging integration, enabling customers to reach an entirely new level of performance and power efficiency.

Together with our key EDA partners, we also introduced the 3Dblox open standard, which aims to modularize and streamline the 3D IC design solutions for the industry. The new 3Dblox 2.0, launched at this year’s OIP Ecosystem Forum, enables 3D architecture exploration with an innovative early design solution for power and thermal feasibility studies. This will significantly boost design efficiency and accelerate design turnaround time from architecture to the final implementation.

“For more than a decade, TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform program has been pivotal to advancing the development and optimization of certified design flows and IP on TSMC’s process technologies,” said Sassine Ghazi, president and COO at Synopsys. “Synopsys has been a trusted partner in the Open Innovation Platform Alliance since its inception and shares the common goal of helping customers achieve the best quality of results and meet time to market goals with AI-driven EDA flows and silicon-proven IP. We look forward to continuing this strong collaboration to help designers overcome the growing challenges of complex semiconductor design in advanced and specialty nodes across AI, high-performance computing, automotive and mobile applications.”

I can’t believe how far we have come in 15 years, and I’m excited to see how our ecosystem will grow and thrive in the next 15 years and beyond. No matter where the industry is headed, the collective know-how of TSMC and all our OIP partners is always available to ensure that our customers are staying ahead of the industry curve with innovation.