Santa Clara, Calif., October 10, 2019 – GLOBALFOUNDRIES® (GF®), the world’s leading specialty foundry, announced today that it has acquired the PDK (Process Design Kit) engineering team from Smartcom Bulgaria AD in Sofia, Bulgaria. The newly acquired team will enhance GF’s scale and capabilities, while strengthening competitiveness of its specialized application solutions to further position the company for growth and value creation.

Process Design Kits are the critical interface between a company’s integrated circuit (IC) design and the fabs, which manufacture the clients chip products. Since 2015, Smartcom has supported GF’s PDK development and quality assurance for platform technologies spanning from 350nm to 12nm. Under the terms of the acquisition, GF will acquire Smartcom’s PDK development team of more than 125 employees. The newly acquired team will be led by Dr. Dobromir Gaydazhiev, an experienced industry veteran who has been responsible for leading the business since its inception in 2003. The deal is expected to close in December 2019, following receipt of required regulatory approvals.

With this acquisition, GF is expanding its worldwide design enablement capabilities and strengthening its European footprint. The Sofia operations build on GF’s long established Fab 1 operations in Dresden, Germany, the company’s Bump Test Facility (BTF) and the AMTC mask house, a joint venture with Toppan. These three facilities with more than 3500 employees and a combined investment of more than US $12B are central to Silicon Saxony, Europe’s largest and most significant microelectronics cluster.

“Today is an exciting day for GF. As we continue to offer more feature-rich differentiated solutions for our clients, PDKs are becoming increasingly important,” said Thomas Caulfield, CEO of GF. “With the acquisition of Smartcom’s PDK development team, we are enhancing the depth and breadth of our capabilities and capacity in Europe and across the globe. We have worked with the Sofia team for many years and the quality of their work is unmatched in the industry. We fully expect to expand our investment in our worldwide PDK organization to meet the growing demands of our clients.” 

“We are excited to join GF at this time and to be part of GF’s growth strategy,” said Dr. Dobromir Gaydazhiev, managing director PDK Services Bulgaria EAD. “Our collaboration goes back many years and our progress has been largely fueled by GF. The team and I are looking forward to become fully integrated into GF’s design enablement processes and to helping enable our clients’ products with our PDKs. We also appreciate the opportunity to engage in European programs and projects that bring together RTOs, IDMs, Design System Companies with Foundries to advance Europe’s capabilities and capacities in microelectronics.”