Ahmedabad, NFAPost: The brain of modern day machines in the form of advanced semiconductor chips is the central driving force of today’s AI systems, whether it is ChatGPT or your image recognition camera. More than any other industry, it is the semiconductor industry which is the front-runner in using AI to develop even more capable chips to process data close to human brain. Semiconductor chip design is increasingly leveraging software for further automation.
The chip design software and tools are called Electronics Design Automation (EDA) software. Five most popular companies in this area are Synopsys, Cadence, Ansys, Keysight and Siemens. The software tools from Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens are used to design chips from concept to fabrication. The products from these three companies mostly compete with each other rather than complementing. whereas the software tools from Ansys, and Keysight complement to those provided by three companies mentioned above.
The latest trend now is emerging of open source EDA tools, which are nearly free. The open source EDA tools are improving in performance, but as of now they can not be used to design commercially successful high-performance chips. however they are evolving faster.
It is estimated to cost more than 100 million US$ to design a 3 nm SOC chip. The major cost in design of such chips involves human resources, EDA tools, and the test and measurement tools. In order to reduce or optimize the EDA tool costs, cloud-based EDA tools are offered by these companies on subscription basis.
India is becoming best source to completely design the chip from concept to full fabrication, where the local talent is world-class as well as less-expensive. India is home to around 1 Lakh VLSI design engineers. VLSI design talent in India is concentrated in the cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Noida, and Chennai. Recently added to the list is Bhubaneswar in Odisha.
Synopsys, Cadence, Ansys, Keysight and Siemens have large operations in India both for internal development as well as local customer support.
Google cloud is one of the popular computing-environment for open-source cloud based chip-design. Google designed its chips Tensor SoC on the cloud. Google has made available some of the tools and learning openly available for designing complex SOC chips.
Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens support users to use cloud-based design automation tools on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Synopsys helps VLSI design engineers to deploy their EDA workload on Amazon Web services securely.
