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Modern computing chips are made of billions of transistors and
wires laid down on a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail.
Precisely how all the elements are placed on the chip, along
with other design and architecture choices, has a major impact
on how well they perform and how much they cost to make.
Major chip firms like Intel Corp or Nvidia Corp can spend two
years and hundreds of millions of dollars to perfect their
designs. Synopsys is one of the major makers of software used to
do that work.
The company has started weaving artificial intelligence called
DSO.ai into its flagship chip design suite to help chip
designers get better results, faster, while trying to balance
trade-offs on speed, power efficiency and cost to meet their
business goals. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Renesas
Electronics Corp have begun using it, with Samsung last year
saying it had cut a chip design step that would have taken
months down to weeks.
On Monday, Synopsys said the AI system can now take into account
what software will eventually run on a chip to squeeze out more
gains. A major cloud computing provider that it did not name got
a 26% gain in power efficiency versus the best solution found by
human designers.
In the past, gains like those came from a new generation of chip
manufacturing technology that would come every two years rather
than purely from the design. The new software can squeeze much
more out of existing chip factories, said Aart de Geus, chief
executive of Synopsys.
"It is significant because design is now actually more of the
enabler than ever before," de Geus told Reuters in an interview.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; editing by Diane
Craft)
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