Lurking inside your next gadget may be a chip unlike those of the past. People used to do all the complex silicon design work, but for the first time, AI is helping to build new chips for data centers, smartphones, and IoT devices. AI firm Synopsys has announced that its DSO.ai tool has successfully aided in the design of 100 chips, and it expects that upward trend to continue.
Companies like STMicroelectronics and SK Hynix have turned to Synopsys to accelerate semiconductor designs in an increasingly competitive environment. The past few years have seen demand for new chips increase while materials and costs have rocketed upward. Therefore, companies are looking for ways to get more done with less, and that’s what tools like DSO.ai are all about.
The tool can search design spaces, telling its human masters how best to arrange components to optimize power, performance, and area, or PPA as it’s often called. Among those 100 AI-assisted chip designs, companies have seen up to a 25% drop in power requirements and a 3x productivity increase for engineers. SK Hynix says a recent DSO.ai project resulted in a 15% cell area reduction and a 5% die shrink.
