The Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute (TSRI) yesterday signed an agreement with British semiconductor and software design company Arm Ltd, allowing TSRI free access to a wide range of Arm’s products for research purposes.

TSRI is the first institute in Asia to be included in the Arm Flexible Access for Research program, enabling researchers to use processors and software produced by Arm when designing new systems of their own.

Under the program, Taiwanese researchers would not have to develop chips from scratch, but could instead build on existing products, TSRI director-general Yeh Wen-kuan said at the signing ceremony in Taipei.

“It is like standing on the shoulders of giants. It dramatically lowers the barrier to entry,” Yeh said.

Other institutes that have signed agreements with Arm include Harvard University in the US and the University of Cambridge in the UK, he added.

Chen Chi-shi , a deputy section chief at TSRI, said that the goal of the program is to help professors further their research and enable students to gain hands-on experience in their respective fields.

With the signing of the agreement, TSRI has also become the first research institute to gain access to ETHOS-N78, the newest neural processing unit developed by Arm, Arm Taiwan president C.K. Tseng said.

The new neural processing unit can be used in accelerating the development of artificial intelligence applications, Tseng said.

TSRI is one of eight institutes under the Ministry of Science and Technology’s National Applied Research Laboratories.

By: DocMemory
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