Semiconductor foundry UMC has joined the Power Forward Initiative (PFI). 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), which 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."
"It is important for foundries and design software and IP providers to work closely together to address the issue of low-power design," said Jan Willis, senior vice president of Industry Alliances at Cadence. 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."
The Power Forward Initiative is an industry initiative sponsored by Cadence and has the goal of enabling the design and production of more power-efficient electronic devices. The Advisory Group consists of representative companies across the design chain from microprocessors to IP to foundries and semiconductor companies and includes four EDA companies including Cadence. CPF v1.0 was contributed by Cadence to the Silicon Integration Initiative’s (Si2’s) Low Power Coalition in December 2006 and is now available as an Si2 standard to the industry at large.
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