Summary
The goal of the TIC Program is to develop and demonstrate split-manufacturing, a new approach to chip fabrication where security and intellectual property protection can be assured.
The semiconductor industry has been advancing rapidly with aggressive scaling. Extending beyond the Moore’s Law of digital processing and storage integrated circuits, this scaling has extended to 3-dimensions to keep pace. This scaling trend has fostered the integration of diverse analog and digital components to provide high value systems such as sensors, actuators, and biochips. The key capabilities to fabricate the high performance integrated circuit components for these high value systems are in the commercial foundries, which now dominate the world’s production of high performance integrated circuits. It is desirable for the US academic community and the US industrial base to have open and assured access to obtain the highest performance integrated circuits (IC’s) and systems-on-chips (SoC’s) while ensuring that components have been securely fabricated according to design and that intellectual property is protected.
