Best Options for Using AI in Chip Design

Summary

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss how and where AI can be applied to chip design to maximize its value, and how that will impact the design process, with Chuck Alpert, Cadence Fellow; Sathish Balasubramanian, head of product marketing and senior director for custom IC at Siemens EDA; Anand Thiruvengadam, senior director and head of AI product management at Synopsys; Sailesh Kumar, CEO of Baya Systems; Mehir Arora, head of engineering at ChipAgents; Daren McClearnon, product manager at Keysight. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one, click here. L-R: Keysight’s McLearnon; Synopsys’ Thiruvengadam; ChipAgents’ Arora; Cadence’s Alpert; Siemens’ Balasubramanian; Baya Systems’ Kumar. SE: Does AI fundamentally change chip design? In the past, designs were broadly domain-specific? But in the future, can you have domains and sub-domains, as opposed to one large domain? Balasubramanian: Yes, and that’s a big change. For each of the verticals, there are certain criteria that are important, like automotive or mission-critical applications. In high-performance computing, no one used to care. We used to talk about low power, but five years ago, no one was talking about low power anymore. Just look at NVIDIA racks and their power consumption. It’s all speed, speed, speed. Each vertical has its own requirements, and that drives what kind of technology or product or solution we need to provide to our customers. Kumar: CAD tools can benefit a lot from AI. As you build these models, you automate a lot of things based on data. That’s where you can build vertical solutions because each vertical’s design patterns are different. So you can have highly focused AI. Alpert: I look at the technology and ask, ‘What can we build with LLMs today? What do we think we can deliver in three months or six months?’ Obviously you want to collect the low-hanging fruit like debug analysis. You generate scripts to say, ‘What is wrong with my des...