1. Purpose and scope
Until this stage the node has been an engineering project inside the foundry and a few close partners. Customer Design Enablement is where it becomes something other companies can design products on. The node is only as useful as the kit, tools and IP that come with it: a customer cannot start a product without device models it trusts, rules it can check against, a tool flow known to work with those rules, and the standard cells, memories and I/O cells that almost every design needs.
The stage therefore has two jobs. The first is to release and support the pre-production design kit with its limits stated plainly, so customers can design products and take a measured risk. The second is to carry the first customer designs to tape-out, often on multi-project wafer shuttles first and full mask sets later, and to check those designs against the kit before masks are made.
In scope: the pre-production design kit and its release notes, certification of electronic design automation flows, foundation IP characterisation and third-party IP onboarding, the shuttle schedule, customer design support and tape-out checks. Out of scope: intrinsic reliability qualification, which runs in parallel and closes in Process Reliability Qualification, and the production design kit, released in Risk Production.
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