Global semiconductor foundry UMC has joined the Power Forward Initiative (PFI), which is an industry initiative sponsored by Cadence Design Systems Inc.
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It has the goal of enabling the design and production of more power efficient electronic devices. The Initiative, made up of more than 20 industry-leading electronics companies, was formed in May 2006 to advance the adoption of the Common Power Format (CPF) that captures essential design intent for power and links the design, implementation and verification domains.
"UMC has developed one of the industry's most comprehensive low power solution packages to help our customers effectively design for low power and power management applications targeting the consumer, wireless and communication segments," said Patrick Lin, SoC chief architect at UMC.
"In order to extend our expertise to support broader, industry-wide low power efforts, we have joined the Power Forward Initiative and expect that the Common Power Format will streamline the entire low power design process to help customers accelerate the migration to advanced process nodes."
Jan Willis, senior vice president of Industry Alliances at Cadence, explained, "It is important for foundries and design software and IP providers to work closely together to address the issue of low power design.
We applaud UMC's leadership and commitment to invest their resources to support the work of the Power Forward Initiative. The continued momentum of the Initiative speaks to the importance of making low power design easier at advanced technology nodes."