CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
6 October 2005
Product News
Cadence and UMC Sign Agreement to Streamline Wireless Design in the Fabless Market
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and UMC announced a collaborative agreement to develop a comprehensive reference solution for complex wireless designs. The jointly-developed reference solution, which will be based on the Cadence® Virtuoso® custom design platform and targets UMC's RFCMOS processes, will also include a reference design and other key technology from UMC.
Growing demand for analog / mixed-signal and RF devices for wireless applications, such as WLAN 802.11, UWB, and Bluetooth, is driving the need to integrate these various components into a single SoC and accelerate the path to wireless design. This new collaboration addresses these challenges by combining UMC's RFCMOS process technologies to deliver RF capabilities and Cadence's analog / mixed-signal and RF design tools and flow integration. The collaboration's first key milestone-the verification of the reference design-has been completed using the Virtuoso platform.
"Aggressive consumer demand for wireless products makes it critical for our customers to achieve silicon success quickly and meet market demand," said Patrick T. Lin, chief SoC architect, system and architecture support at UMC. "By leveraging Cadence's Virtuoso platform with UMC's advanced manufacturing capabilities, we can provide a streamlined methodology for the design, simulation and integration of different components into complex SoCs used in wireless devices."
The reference design consists of Digital Baseband Physical Layer Blocks, Mixed-Mode 1GHz AD/DA converter blocks, RF components, along with several pieces of enabling intellectual property (IP) from UMC. The companies plan to complete development of the reference flow over the next several months and then harden the reference design into silicon. Customers will ultimately be able to access a complete wireless reference design package from UMC. The package will include the reference design, the design flow, compatible process design kit (PDK) and silicon-validation results from the reference design.
"The cost, performance and power requirements of today's advanced wireless devices are driving greater functional integration, leading to sophisticated and integrated SoC solutions," said Jan Willis, senior vice president of Industry Alliances at Cadence. "Our collaboration with UMC addresses these challenges by providing customers with a comprehensive technology solution to help shorten their product development time for wireless designs."
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