• Advanced packaging consortium members get Ansys software free for a month to a year.
• After that, they pay, and recruitment is open to firms outside Singapore.

Companies joining the advanced packaging consortium set up by A*STAR’s Institute of Microelectronics and Synopsys will get simulation software free for between one month and a year, and move onto commercial terms after that, the two organisations have said.

Recruitment has opened, and it is not restricted to Singapore-registered companies.

The consortium, the A*STAR IME–Ansys Joint Innovation Consortium for Semiconductor Excellence, or JICSE, was announced on 9 September. The announcement said Synopsys would provide trial licences to A*STAR IME and up to ten member companies, and that the first phase would target problems including warpage, thermo-mechanical stress, solder joint reliability and moisture-induced failure, the kinds of faults simulation is meant to catch before a package is physically built.

Terence Gan, executive director of A*STAR IME, and Shitalkumar Joshi, senior director at Ansys, filled in those terms in an interview with Tech Wire Asia.

What members get, and for how long

“Each participating company will be able to use the software for a period of a month to one year, based on each company’s requirement,” Joshi said, with access renewed periodically and subject to licence terms.

Asked what happens at the end of that period, and whether companies move to commercial terms or the consortium funds continued access, he was direct.

“After the period of this agreed time limit, the company would be moving to the normal commercial process,” Joshi said.

He framed the free period as a way to get companies over the first hurdle. Engineers use it to learn the tools, validate simulation methods against a real engineering problem their company brings to the consortium, and work simulation into their design process.

Gan described the division of labour between the two partners. “The intent of this is to bring the simulation and modelling capabilities to a completely new set of customers,” he said. Synopsys provides the tools and A*STAR IME helps new users apply them, “because they know the tools, whereas we know the application the tools are used for.”

Who can join

The primary target is smaller companies. “The original intent, and that continues to be, is SMEs, small and medium enterprises who want to get into the semiconductor domain and move faster,” Joshi said. “That’s the goal.” Established organisations will be considered case by case if they show interest.

So will companies from outside Singapore. Joshi said there has already been interest from beyond the country and that Synopsys and A*STAR IME intend to accommodate it case by case.

The September announcement had framed the collaboration more narrowly. Sukhwan Moon, vice president of APAC sales at Synopsys, said in it that the collaboration “aims to back local companies in Singapore” on reliability, performance and scalability.

There is a practical constraint on that. Gan said he believed the licences are locked to a server, which would mean member companies have to be physically present to use them. “Any companies of any nationality can join, but to protect the security of the licences, they have to be physically present to utilise the licences,” he said.

Phase one is narrower than the announcement suggested

The 9 September announcement listed four failure modes for the consortium’s first phase. Joshi said the first year is narrower than that.

“For phase one, it is more about the mechanical reliability, warpage, and life of the components,” he said. That work will use Ansys standalone mechanical tools rather than Multiphysics Fusion, which Synopsys announced in March as the first of a set of products integrating Ansys simulation engines into its own design software, and which it said then was in beta with early access customers. Joshi described Multiphysics Fusion as combining Synopsys’ Fusion Compiler with Ansys solvers, and said it would come into the consortium’s work in later phases.

Phase one runs for one year. Thermal and electrical work may follow, and Multiphysics Fusion with it, Joshi said, though he was careful to describe the later phases as adaptive rather than fixed.

What the advanced packaging consortium is measured on

Gan said the collaboration will not be measured in dollars.

“I don’t think the value of this collaboration is in terms of the dollar values,” he said. “If you want to put a dollar value on it, it’s really the benefits that the companies get out of this, rather than the monetary value of what we put in.”

Joshi said Synopsys wants the consortium to demonstrate what simulation-led engineering can do on real advanced packaging problems. He also expects it to produce insight into a fast-changing field that Synopsys can turn into reusable workflows, and to widen adoption of simulation-led design.

He did not put a conversion target on it. “Our measure of success is broader than any immediate licence conversion,” Joshi said. “It’s whether the consortium strengthens the industry capability, creates the trusted methods, and builds confidence in simulation-led packaging development.”

The model is specific to Singapore, he added. Synopsys works with research consortiums in other countries, but each is shaped around local partners and local requirements.

Gan has run A*STAR IME for five years. Before that, he spent 25 years at the Economic Development Board, where he ran the semiconductors team. Joshi has been at Ansys for 26 years and joined Synopsys through its acquisition of the company, which closed in July 2025.

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