Dr. James YangMicroIP Inc. is a world-class pioneer in IC architecture design automation and performance analysis, mainly based on its own research and development of EDA tools, Architecture Compiler (AC), and Performance Analyzer (PA). MicroIP helps IC design and design service companies with architectural design services before proceeding with IC design, and performance analysis services after conducting IC designs. By providing the aforementioned services, MicroIP is greatly reducing the risk of design failure for IC design and design service companies in the development of IC products, minimizing the R&D costs by 67%, accelerating the design verification by 2000 times, and shortening the time-to-market by 50%.

Breaking the Shackles to Lead the IC Design Community 

MicroIP hopes to lead the IC design community by breaking through the limits of Moore's law and driving the technology sector to continue to move forward in the post-Moore's law era.

Since its inception, the company has pioneered several initiatives that contributed to the growth of the semiconductor industry. In 2011, MicroIP established itself in the Republic of Seychelles. Moving forward to 2015, the company's product trading system was successfully developed and launched, which was followed by its outsourcing service system in the next year. In 2017, MicroIP successfully launched its global outsourcing service platform, making 2018 the year where the company's first-time realizing profit was achieved after taxing. In 2019, the company's Architecture Compiler was successfully developed and launched, and as recent as 2021, MicroIP witnessed the successful deployment of its Performance Analyzer.

A Revolutionary Leader 

Dr. James Yang is the President of MicroIP Inc. He has proposed several revolutionary concepts and technologies for the global semiconductor industry, and these concepts have been successively adopted in recent years or proved to have brought great changes and influences to the modern semiconductor technologies in the post Moore's law era. For example, the concept of cloud IC collaborative design was proposed by James in 2014. He is the first person in the world to propose a cloud IC collaborative design platform. Through this platform, global IC design engineers can design ICs across time zones and nationalities regardless of when and where they are. Nowadays, TSMC cooperates with many EDA tool companies and several other cloud server supplier companies to build the TSMC Cloud Alliance. Taking another instance, in 2016, James proposed that the best way to extend Moore's law is architecture design and optimization, for which an efficient automatic EDA tool should be developed and adopted. However, in today’s semiconductor sphere, major IC design companies, such as Intel, put a lot of effort into optimizing the IC architecture. Also, other EDA tool companies focus on developing and offering this kind of EDA tool to IC design and design service companies.

Furthermore, James also developed the world's first network security chip that supports multiple interfaces simultaneously. After that, the chip's network security protection core was separated into Silicon IP and was successfully licensed to an American CPU chip design company and an Indian design service company.

Entwining Advanced Techniques with Next-Gen Computing

MicroIP focuses on bridging the gap between high-end IPs and a successful SoC design for next-generation computing. James says that customers can leverage the extensive SoC design experience of Micro-IP for neural networking processing, high-speed interconnection, chiplet integration, and so on. It also provides end-to-end design solutions for AI processing, including model transformation, SW and HW optimizations, and system acceleration.

Novel Technologies at the Heart of Developing New Applications 

James presumes that novel technologies open up a broad spectrum of new applications, which require cross-layer designs to address the tightly integrated system with correlated design factors. Thus, MicroIP provides end-to-end AI architectural design services that aim for diverse AI applications, starting from AI models to SW and HW optimizations. After finishing the AI front-end design, the team leverages an in-house performance analyzer to complete the SoC design trace and analysis, which helps the customers to identify the design and performance issues earlier.

Edge AI Devices: The Key Factor Behind MicroIP’s Growth

As per James, MicroIP provides end-to-end services using Edge AI devices by working closely with customers on both application requirements as well as model refinement. The team performs a high-level evaluation with quick feedback and in-depth optimization to attain the best performance per cost. The company has strong connections to world-class IP providers to support the broad portfolio of key modules. With extensive experience in SoC design and system integration, MicroIP efficiently bridges SW and HW from FPGA prototyping to ASIC.

He adds that over the years, MicroIP has garnered key partnerships with companies like ARM, Andes, TSMC, UMC, Global Foundry, SMIC, GUC, Socle, VIA, and several others to support the customers.

Combating the Recruitment and AI Advancement Challenges 

James states that MicroIP has a rapidly growing customer base, therefore it needs more funding to recruit top-notch engineers to enable high-performance designs within the time-to-market. The company is competing with tier-one SoC design houses on engineering resources. Recruiting first-class engineers has become extremely competitive when large design houses are aggressively hiring with offers that are way above the market average.

Besides, the company is also facing challenges with customer education on the potential of AI technology and is still urgently required. Some design houses and system providers are still not quite aware of AI applications and market trends, says James.

Valuable News Mentions and Features

James reveals that MicroIP has launched the world's first commercialized IC design project outsourcing platform to stronghold its global presence. The company which needs IC design service outsources the IC design project via MicroIP’s cloud outsourcing service platform and the IC design job can locally be performed in Taiwan.

Furthermore, MicroIP developed and launched the world's first commercialized chip architecture automation design EDA software - Architecture Compiler in early 2019 mentions James. He adds that it has been reported by Fox, NBC, ABC news channels in the United States and Taiwan Wealth magazine, Economic Daily News, CTimes magazine, DigiTimes and it successfully won design service orders from Novatek, the eighth-largest IC design company in the world followed by two major Taiwan domestic research institutions- the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and the Institute of Information Technology (III).

Lastly, MicroIP launched a chip performance analysis EDA software- Performance Analyzer, which can find very complex and difficult SoC design problems for IC design companies within just a few minutes, which traditionally takes weeks to find out by the IC design companies, according to James. After the launch of this new technology, it immediately received a report in the Economic Daily News in Taiwan and won the design service order from the world's largest design service company.

A Future Driven by Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Adoption

James says that MicroIP is in really good shape in this booming era of AI, but will continue to face many grand challenges ahead. The company is driven to believe that AI will be the essential kernel in most of the next-generation data processing systems and that MicroIP will certainly be the key player in this exciting, challenging, and also significantly rewarding future.