SANTA CLARA, California, March 11 - Synopsys on Wednesday introduced a set of software tools intended to help designers manage the rising complexity of creating artificial intelligence chips. The launch represents the initial wave of new offerings following Synopsys' $35 billion acquisition of engineering software firm Ansys.
For decades Synopsys has been a principal supplier of electronic design automation software used to determine how to place and connect the tens of billions of transistors inside chips made by companies such as Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, the latter of which last year invested $2 billion in Synopsys. The company announced the new tools at a conference in Silicon Valley.
Synopsys said the products respond to an industry-wide shift away from monolithic chips toward designs composed of many smaller "chiplets" that are stacked and packaged together in increasingly intricate configurations. That architectural trend was a key driver of the Ansys deal, Synopsys executives said, because designers must now confront issues historically handled by mechanical engineers.
Those issues include whether heat generated by a chiplet could cause it to warp or expand in ways that might cause cracking or separation from an adjacent chiplet - a failure that could destroy a complex chip assembly with a manufacturing cost that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Sassine Ghazi, the chief executive officer of Synopsys, described the new tools as an effort to incorporate those engineering analyses into the tools chip designers already use. "Typically you have engineers designing for each step in a siloed way," Ghazi said. "What ends up happening is that the product is more expensive and its not operating at its maximum potential. Were putting them in the design phase, so youre able to achieve a better performance, lower power and definitely lower cost."
The company said these capabilities are being embedded into the design flow used by chipmakers such as Intel and other industry participants. By integrating mechanical and thermal considerations earlier in the design process, Synopsys aims to reduce downstream surprises and the need for costly redesigns or rework.
Synopsys' announcement underscores the increasing overlap between electronic design automation and traditional engineering disciplines as chip architectures become more heterogeneous and physically complex. The new tools are positioned as the first tranche of products to emerge following the Ansys acquisition, reflecting an attempt to bridge those engineering domains within a single set of software solutions.
Impacted sectors: Semiconductor design, electronic design automation (EDA) software, and engineering simulation tools.