At the 2025 TSMC North America Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum, Siemens Digital Industries Software announced new collaborations with TSMC to support the foundry’s latest process technologies. The partnership focuses on certifications and design solutions for advanced processes, including AI-driven design, 3D IC, and silicon photonics, enabling mutual customers to develop innovative products.
The collaboration includes several key developments. Siemens’ Calibre Vision AI software was evaluated for Design Rule Check (DRC) productivity, showing improved debugging efficiency for DRC violations, with results jointly validated by Siemens and TSMC. The Calibre nmPlatform software suite, including Calibre nmDRC, nmLVS, PERC, and xACT, is certified for TSMC’s N3C, N2P, and A16TM processes, supporting industry-standard signoff technology.
Siemens’ Solido Simulation Suite software is certified for SPICE accuracy on TSMC’s N3C, N2P, and A16 processes, aiding analog, mixed-signal, RF, standard cell, and memory designs. It also supports TSMC’s A16 custom design reference flow (CDRF) with Reliability Aware Simulation for IC aging, self-heating, and Safe Operation Area checks. Additionally, Siemens’ Solido Design Environment software enhances variation-aware verification and cell optimization for A16.
Siemens’ Aprisa software is certified for TSMC’s N2P process, with validated implementation flows for placement, routing, chip finishing, and engineering change orders, targeting optimized performance, power, and area (PPA) for faster design closure.
For 3D IC and silicon photonics, Siemens’ Calibre 3DSTACK Advanced and 3DThermal software are certified for TSMC’s 3DFabric® and Compact Universal Photonic Engine (COUPE) technologies, supporting physical verification and static thermal analysis. Siemens’ tools, including Innovator3D IC, L-Edit, and Calibre xACT, enable design flows for TSMC-COUPETM, with Innovator3D IC supporting the 3Dblox language format, which is progressing toward IEEE standardization.
In cloud-based initiatives, Siemens and TSMC demonstrated Solido Simulation Suite, Calibre nmDRC, and Calibre PERC software on the AWS Cloud, qualified for TSMC’s N2 Certification, optimizing tool accuracy and job parallelism to reduce time to tape-out.
These efforts aim to provide mutual customers with tools to leverage TSMC’s advanced process and packaging technologies for next-generation semiconductor designs.
