TSMC OIP 2023 Silicon Valley

G. Dan Hutcheson

The Chip Insider®

Summary:

TSMC OIP 2023 Silicon Valley: This year marked the 15th anniversary of Morris Chang’s founding of its Open Innovation Platform®. As you know, it is TSMC’s IP design, test, and packaging ecosystem. It came to be out of market-driven emergent behavior phenomena, like how Moore’s Law creates coordinated innovation to a uniform cadence. Morris saw this emergent process around TSMC at a time when Apple had shown tremendous gains from its ecosystem and decided to formalize a strategy around it.

Morris’s OIP proved to be more than just a new brand cloaking something that already existed. It marked a turn in policy and its transition from Foundry 1.0 to 2.0. Prior to OIP … fabless companies threw a design over the wall at tapeout and the foundry just made the wafers... New nodes were developed with little to no outside collaboration with the IP, design, test, and packaging companies. Yield was the responsibility of the designer, not the foundry…

This was all changing around the time OIP came to be because variability had emerged as a big issue… This was an existential threat to TSMC, so it had to change. With Morris’s OIP; IP, design, test, and packaging companies … were now partners.

OIP has steadily evolved over the 15 years it has been in existence. At 2023’s OIP forum, they said much of the IP and EDA tools were already available for its N2 process, which is not expected to be in volume production until the second-half 2025… That also means the build-out of TSMC’s 3Dblox standard is critically important to everyone’s future…

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