Fast Development of High-performance ICs in AI/IoT Era

The ICs for Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (AI/IoT) as strong driving force for future IC industry need massive capabilities as well as rapid development/manufacturing cycles. Thus, the IC development for AI/ IoT shall have systematic methodology for concurrent engineering and multi-level co-optimization among process/ design/system in order to achieve high performance, good yield, reliability, and fast time-to-market. Most BEOL based specialty devices/process and 3DIC/SIP are CMOS compatible; thus, they are highly preferred to be integrated with CMOS FEOL platform for fast IC development in AI/IoT era. Further, traditional IDMs or Foundries ("virtual-IDM") are increasingly incapable of providing effective environment for co-optimization among logic platforms (i.e. CMOS, SOI, FinFET) and concurrent design among IPs and circuit designers. Instead, product focused foundry (referred to as Commune-IDM, or "C-IDM") with Process, Design, System partners closely together in organization can effectively share resources and data in "cloud" platform can be much more effective and superior (than IDM or "virtual-IDM") toward fast development and manufacturing of IC in AI/IoT era.