SAFE Forum 2022: Samsung Foundry’s Innovation Catalyst Shines a Light on an Array of Fields

Samsung Foundry employees, partners and customers gathered in San Jose for Samsung’s SAFE Forum 2022. The title of the forum was The Innovation Catalyst, an apt name for an event that brought together individuals from all over the Samsung Foundry ecosystem for a melting pot of talks and technical sessions covering industry trends, innovations and the work the SAFE program is doing to deliver a top-tier customer experience. Ryan Lee, Head of Design Platform Development at Samsung Foundry, opened the day’s talks by reiterating SAFE’s structure, goals and commitment to close, effective partnership.

SAFE: The Beating Heart of Foundry SAFE, which stands for Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem, is a wide-reaching program that seeks to triangulate the Foundry, its partners and its customers to provide powerful, cutting-edge System on Chip (SoC) designs. While previous SAFE Forums focused on partnership, design and performance respectively, 2022’s event brought it all together under the Innovation Catalyst banner, a celebration of past successes and a call to galvanize the whole Foundry spectrum for the challenges and opportunities of the future. “At SAFE Forum 2022, we and our ecosystem partners will share new design infrastructure and solutions to realize the true innovation of our whole industry,” said Lee, before breaking down five SAFE programs that are central to its incisive customer service capabilities.

SAFE Intellectual Property (IP) SAFE IP is a partner program that helps build a firm connection between Samsung Foundry and its IP partners. The program is designed to be responsive to customer needs and provide diverse portfolios in numerous areas. SAFE IP offers CONNECT, an easily navigable and comprehensive IP taxonomy. It also offers a bespoke tagging system for monitoring IP manufacturing status for intuitive marketing and promotion. The SAFE Quality Control Program (SAFE-QCP), meanwhile, provides sign-off criteria and qualification metrics specific to IPs to ensure customers get the exact IP design they need. Both dedicated and foundation IP designs are optimized to serve performance-intensive applications of all kinds. “Our IP partnership has been growing fast over the past few years,” said Lee. “We now have 56 IP partners and our number of IP titles exceeds 4000. We have certified IPs for high performance applications such as PCIe(Peripheral Component Interconnect express), DDR(Double Date Rate), D2D(Die to Die) and 112G Serdes.” SAFE Electronic Design Automation (EDA) SAFE EDA offers fundamental RTL-to-GDS design methodologies, also called Foundry DM, to assist customers in designing unique, advanced products through Samsung Foundry process. EDA reference flow development certifies all the important EDA tools used in the company’s process. The EDA toolchain and flow stay consistent with the company’s standards. SAFE EDA also covers automotive fields, helping customers in an industry that is expanding its autonomous vehicle capabilities. SAFE EDA makes sure automotive SoCs adhere to industry standards and qualifications, helping customers navigate the numerous components that must be integrated into safety mechanisms. The company’s Multi-Die Integration (MDI™) design solution service, meanwhile, is a thorough solution provider, ranging from basic design setup to physical verification, with many more uses besides. “EDA tools are ready to address customer design needs through Samsung Foundry’s EDA certification program,” explained Lee. “It sets a standard in the accuracy and efficiency of EDA tools and ensures our customers’ design success. Our EDA partners provide leading edge design methodologies to secure the best PPA and fast TAT.” SAFE Cloud By working with major public cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as leading EDA companies like Cadence and Synopsys, SAFE Cloud aims to strengthen and improve its customers’ complete design workflows, offering a design environment that is more flexible and supportive than ever. SAFE Design Solution Partners (DSP) and SAFE Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) SAFE’s nine global DSP partners help customers keep cost and size down thanks to application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design expertise and supply chain management. Well acquainted with Samsung Foundry’s process options, SAFE DSP makes design work streamlined and accessible. “Last but not least: OSAT partners,” Lee continued. “Together with advanced process technology, advanced packaging technology is becoming more important to support high-performance computing and to reduce the total cost of implementation. We have been collaborating with OSAT partners to build packaging solutions such as 2.5D, 3D and chiplet.”

Partnership Takes Center Stage at SAFE Forum 2022 Samsung Foundry’s robust ecosystem of valued partnerships was in the spotlight at SAFE Forum 2022, with an agenda packed with keynotes, panel discussions, plenary sessions and technical sessions, all involving presentations from partner, customer and industry leader representatives. Keynotes included Synopsys on collaboration opportunities enabling hardware design transformation, Cadence on catalyzing innovation and AMD on creating solutions for high performance and adaptive computing. Panelists featured representatives from SoC and IP startups including AyarLabs, Avicena, Esperanto, Groq and Ethernovia. A partner pavilion, which attendees could visit, featured 38 partners. “I am so grateful for and proud of the achievements we have built together,” said Lee, expressing his sincere appreciation of all SAFE partners and encouraging guests to network and learn more. Four Technical Sessions Exploring the World of SAFE Lee concluded by teeing up the afternoon’s four technical sessions. Spanning 22 presentations, these sessions covered several of Samsung Foundry’s biggest projects in four key SAFE fields: how progress is going, what has been achieved and what the future holds for numerous vital, innovative Foundry technologies. The first session came under the theme of GAA and More Moore, which explored Samsung’s journey with its most advanced process technology, 3nm GAA. The second session was Multi-die Integration, which covered the company’s design flow and methodology for addressing 3DIC design challenges in multi-die systems. This included TSV-aware design, 3D IC partitioning and package implementation. The third session, Advanced IP for HPC, tackled leading IP solutions from the SAFE ecosystem for high performance computing. The final session, Advanced Design Platform, saw design solution partners discuss their Samsung Foundry-leveraging design services and solutions, celebrating many success stories while doing so. To learn more about these sessions or to watch them in full, visit the SAFE Forum Archive Page.