Kiphaunri Supports Semiconductor Design System Development... Enhancing Convenience for Fabless Companies

[Asia Economy Reporter Suyeon Woo] K-Foundry announced on the 11th that it has developed a customer-friendly semiconductor design support system called 'PDK (Process Design Kit) Version E' and will provide it to fabless companies.

PDK is a semiconductor manufacturing process-related database provided by semiconductor foundry companies to their fabless clients. Fabless companies use this tool to carry out designs suitable for the foundry's manufacturing processes and equipment characteristics.

Recently, PDK has become a key indicator of the technological capabilities of foundry service providers. Fabless companies benefit from excellent PDKs by reducing potential risks during semiconductor manufacturing and shortening development periods.

K-Foundry has been providing PDK sets that support environments of major chip design tool companies such as Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens to assist customer design. The newly introduced PDK Version E was developed with a focus on improving customer design convenience by adding PDK setup environments and gate-level 'PCells (Gate-level PCells)'.

Unlike the existing method that supports customizing only parts of the PDK set, K-Foundry supports customizing the entire PDK set. Additionally, the GCELL function, provided for the first time in the foundry industry, breaks away from the conventional method that supports only basic unit devices offered by the manufacturing process, by supporting functional units composed of combinations of basic unit devices, thereby enhancing design convenience and reducing time.

On-site, K-Foundry's PDK Version E is already receiving positive responses from fabless companies. Many designers using PDK Version E praised that it is easy to prepare their own design environment and that the convenience of design and layout has improved. Taejong Lee, CEO of K-Foundry, stated, "We will continue to develop improved PDKs to implement foundry services that are one step closer to customers and simultaneously strive to enhance process technology competitiveness."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.