TSMC DESIGN CENTER
IN JAPAN

"We are setting up a sizable Physical Design team (PD team) in TSMC Japan Design Center. This PD team is part of our world-wide PD team with locations in US, Taiwan and Japan. The mission of the PD team is to support our key customers worldwide to adopt our advanced technologies, such as N5/N4/N3, to achieve on time tape-out with first silicon success.

The projects we are working on now is for our 5nm technology, and it is important to our customer’s product line for the next generation.

For every new technology, EDA tools need to be upgraded with new features to meet PD requirement with design rule complied. Standard cell architecture needs to be co-optimized with process technology to achieve the best PPA results; Design flow and CAD scripts/setting all need to be updated as well. These are all the challenges our PD team is facing as we are the first groups worldwide working on physical design of the real product of the most leading node technology.

It is indeed a great and exciting opportunity to access the worldwide leading node technology and to support the PD work for the real product.

Debugging is another exciting challenge giving so many updates from tool, library, design flow, to CAD scripts. It is crucial to find the root cause so we could provide solutions in time in order to meet milestone requirement, especially with customer product launch schedule.

In order to meet customer product design spec and tight schedule, we need to sharpen our advanced physical design skills, practice different APR recipes and tool settings to decide the best solutions to meet the aggressive PPA targets. Most of our work in physical design will be block level implementation. From gate level netlist to final GDS with all timing, power signoff and DRC, LVS, EM/IR verification completed.

For the team culture, we are a project-oriented technical organization. Every member including managers will need to do hands on PD work. PD skills are critical for our jobs. As we will provide extensive training, we also count on every member being self-motivated and working diligently to learn the new technology and PD skills. For team dynamics, we encourage open and constructive communication within the team and with customers, establish strong commitment and ownership to projects, good teamwork spirit to support managers and team members, proactive sharing of best PD practices for team learning and productivity improvement."

JDC is not only part of our world-wide design centers, but also part of our world-wide design talents pool. JDC team member will work on either the JDC specific projects or co-work with the cross-site members on the joint projects.

"We will focus on 1) Key customer PD work, 2) standard cell design, 3) memory solution development, 4) advanced testchip development, 5) chip implementation efficiency enhancement and 6) full custom mask layout support.

In terms of technology, we are working on N5 now, will proceedworking on N3 in the near future.

Working with the most leading node technology is indeed one of the biggest advantages of joining JDC."

All TSMC customers can be Japan Design Center customers depending on the supporting needs and expertise requirement since Japan Design Center is part of TSMC Design and Technology Platform function.

For Physical Design team, to help our members efficiently building up advanced technology PD capabilities, we have setup very good training program as below,

• Process technology and design rules, which is about the most advanced transistor and metal schemes from TSMC
• Standard cell library, from architecture to placement guidelines
• Design flow for efficient design implementation from netlist to GDS
• PPA push techniques for design optimization
• Design signoff and checklist to meet quality requirement

In addition, we have also established the "Buddy" system to assign the experienced PD colleague to assist the new member to speed up the learning through on job training.