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KeyFoundry announced on the 11th that they will develop 'PDK Version E', a customer-friendly semiconductor design support tool, and provide it to semiconductor fabless companies.

PDK is a semiconductor manufacturing process database (DB) that a semiconductor company, Foundry, provides to their fabless companies. Fabless uses PDK to design products that fit the Foundry’s manufacturing process and equipment characteristics. It is becoming more important to usebetter PDK, because it is more likely to reduce risk factors in the manufacturing process and shorten the development period.

PDK version E developed by KeyFoundry is characterized by adding a PDK setup environment and 'gate-level PCell (GCELL)' to maximize customer design convenience. The PDK setup environment supports fabless to enable customization according to the user’s environment to optimize product design, and PDK version E can support the entire PDK, unlike existing PDK where only some parts could be customized.
 
Foundry is providing GCELL for the first time in the industry, where they only provided basic units, and now they support functional units that can combine numbers to overcome the limitation of existing method. Through this, the design convenience of fabless can be improved and the design time can be shortened.

The product is applied to all BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) processes of KeyFoundry. For the BCD process, which has recently increased in demand, the latest model that can realize more accurate silicon property is provided in PDK version E.

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<Key Foundry Cheongju Fab. Photo=Key Foundry>

Tae-jong Lee, CEO of Key Foundry, said, “KeyFoundry has been developing and verifying for many years to strengthen semiconductor design support for fabless companies.We plan to develop and provide more improved PDKto realize Foundry services that are one step closer to customers, while continuing efforts to enhance process technology competitiveness.”
 
By Staff Reporter Dong-jun Kwon (djkwon@etnews.com)