"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 the locations in US, Taiwan and Japan. The mission of the PD team is to support our key customers world wide 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 5nm technology, and are customer’s most important 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 need 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 world wide 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 world wide leading node technology and support the PD work for the real product.
Debugging is another exciting challenge giving so many new updates from tool to library to design flow to CAD scripts. It is important and crucial to find the root cause to 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 sharp 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 job. 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 project, good teamwork spirits to support managers and team members, proactive sharing of best PD practices for team learning and productivity improvement."