Given the deep sub-micron design challenges that circuit designers are facing, UMC Reference Design Flows provide customers with EDA design methodologies that reduce time-to-market by enabling manufacturability. The UMC Reference Design Flows incorporate 3rd-party EDA vendor's baseline design flows to address issues such as timing closure, signal integrity, power consumption and design for manufacturability and adopt a hierarchical design approach built upon silicon validated process libraries. The UMC Reference Design Flows cover from RTL coding all the way to GDS-II generation and support Cadence, Magma, Mentor and Synopsys EDA tools. All of these tools have been correlated to UMC silicon and can be interchanged for added flexibility.

Key benefits to customers

The UMC Reference Design Flows minimize or eliminate any library, technology, tool and flow issues prior to customers' using the libraries, PDK/Foundry Design Kits (FDK) or tools in their design process and predict how their silicon really behaves. In brief, it significantly shortens:

		Time-To-Tape-out
		Time-To-Market
		Time-To-Volume