Every year, due to the presentation of the most cutting edge technologies of semiconductors, scholars and leading industry players all view the flagship conference ISSCC as an indicator that tells the future development trend of semiconductors. Generally, papers accepted by ISSCC would be required of creativity as well as the proof of actual implementations. Therefore, global industry leaders, as well as the internationally renowned universities, all prefer ISSCC as the foremost occasion to announce their latest technology advances and research findings.
The 2013 ISSCC is the 60th annual meeting with 209 papers to be published. Nineteen research papers from Taiwan's business and academic sectors have been selected for presentation, and 13 of the 19 papers are academic researches. Such progress had greatly encouraged the academic communities in Taiwan. Among the accepted papers, 13 of them were developed with assistance of the software provided by NARL-CIC, and 5 of them, with different subjects and respectively from National Chiao Tung University, National Cheng Kung University, National Chung Chen University and National Tsing Hwa University, all made use of the IC/System fabrication environment service offered by NARL-CIC.
Dr. Liang-Gee Chen, President of the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL), appreciated the efforts that the National Chip Implementations Center (CIC) of NARL had built up better environment for Taiwan’s IC design research. Thanks to NARL-CIC and the strong support of the foundries for advanced semiconductor process technologies, such an Industry-Academia-Research cooperation model has achieved tremendous success.
With the vision of “Global excellence, local impact,” NARL actively assists Taiwan’s academic communities to boost their global research and development competitiveness of IC design in an international setting. It successfully helps the academic communities bring down their cost by sharing resources. Scholars and students could make good use of various free chip software and systematic design software, more than ten chip processes technologies and the implementation services provided by NARL-CIC to turn their ideas into actual chips.
With various hardware and software, NARL-CIC not only provides comprehensive design environment, testing instruments and consultation services for student IC designers, but also allows one-stop practices of integrating creativities, techniques and experience to work out implementations.
For a long time, NARL-CIC has been working closely with universities to cultivate top talents for IC design in Taiwan. In addition, it also diligently promotes related education, research and industry development. Recently, all the efforts have well paid off. Statistics show that the annual production value of IC design industry in Taiwan has almost tripled from NTD 150 billion ten years ago to NTD 410 billion in 2012. For the success of strengthening Taiwan’s competition in semiconductor industry, NARL obviously plays the role as a key promoter behind the scenes.
