(Correspondent Xingsheng Wang) On June 24th, 2019, Professor Xingsheng Wang, from the School of Optics and Electronic Information at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), received a series of commercial professional software donation of the technology computer aided design (TCAD) and electronic design automation (EDA). The donation, provided by Synopsys, includes 2 copies of TCAD Sentaurus Suite, Sentaurus Process Explorer, HSPICE, FineSim, Custom WaveView, Custom Design Complier, TCAD to SPICE, Mystic and RandomSpice, 25 copies of TCAD software Garand, and its total market value is worth about 30 million RMB. It is reported that this is the largest donation received by China from the leading international EDA company.
EDA tools are a key part of integrated circuit manufacturing and design which play an important role in the upstream of the integrated circuit industry chain. The EDA industry is also an industry with extremely high barriers and high intelligence. From the latest report, the microelectronic process nodes have advanced to 7nm FinFETs. As a result, TCAD has become an extremely important tool for the research and development (R&D) of the advanced node devices and process integration, which can bring huge advantages in R&D cost and time. Nowadays, China is actively promoting the development of the integrated circuit industry, and the importance of EDA tools including TCAD is self-evident. However, the existing advanced EDA tools on the market are extremely expensive and difficult to obtain.
Due to the strong requirements for advanced researches, Prof. Xingsheng Wang from the school of Optics and Electronic Information actively took the advantage of his own resources, together with the help of his doctoral supervisor Prof. Asen Asenov of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Scotland, finally he won the donation from Synopsys after unremitting efforts for more than a year. That is the large-scale software donation mentioned above. Prof. Xingsheng Wang graduated from Tsinghua University with a master degree and then obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Glasgow in UK, and he has been engaged in advanced research on advanced micro-nano electronic devices and circuits, random fluctuations, modeling and simulation. He joined Synopsys as a senior engineer and was selected in Hubei Province "Hundred Talents Program"(2017). Later in February 2018, he chose to return to China and joined the university in full-time. After returning to China, he actively contacted Synopsys and assisted the appointment of his doctor supervisor Prof. Asen Asenov as an Advisory Professor at HUST in March this year.
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, US, Synopsys has more than 120 branches worldwide and ranks first in the providers of chip automation design solutions and chip interface IP. It is also the leading company in information security and software quality. Synopsys emphasizes the great importance to the development of China's integrated circuit industry, and it has set up a R&D center in Wuhan. It is the TCAD department of Synopsys that has directly contributed to this donation. Synopsys donation is of vital importance to directly promotes the relevant team's cutting-edge research on advanced micro/nano-electronic devices and enhances the teaching and research level of our university's microelectronics discipline, helping the talent training of China's microelectronics integrated circuit industry.
