Cadence AI can increase chip design quality and chip designer productivity by over 1000%

The EDA company’s customers have finished hundreds of new tapouts using Cadence Cerebrus AI to accelerate development and create chips that run faster, use less energy and cost less. For Cadence, AI is about increasing the productivity of engineering teams, bringing high-quality, low-cost chips to market.

While the US CHIPS Act will provide funds to increase domestic design and manufacturing to compete with Taiwan, many projects still lack experienced engineers to perform critical design work. New AI chip projects have begun that require higher performance, lower power, and shorter design times than the 2-3 years typically required for advanced semiconductors. AI has provided significant benefits to chip designers, especially with reinforcement learning for physical layout optimization.

Chip teams are starting to realize some amazing results applying AI across multi-year workflows. At its recent annual user group event, Cadence Design walked the audience through its AI portfolio, announcing that hundreds of business designs have been tapped using Cadence Cerebrus, the company’s back-end design optimization platform . Tal’s strategy of “chips to systems” AI assistance models and software seems strong, and is uniquely connected by a common data and model repository called JedAI. let’s take a closer look.

Cadence AI Portfolio

I was frankly amazed by what Cadence has already accomplished in applying AI to the chip design workflow, although details on which models to use are scant. Cadence has quietly added AI tools to the digital design back-end, debug and verification, analog custom design, printed circuit board design, and multi-physics optimization.

Let’s start with the glue that underpins the Cadence Design portfolio; ZAI.

Cadence Joint Venture Data and AI Platform (ZAI)

Cadence ZAI Platform is an AI powered large scale data analytics environment. Cadence JedAI is a relatively new platform that was launched in 2022 and is constantly evolving.

Cadence makes use of the vast amount of design data generated during the verification and implementation phases of the JedAI design process. The platform also enables vertical knowledge transfer which will provide an opportunity for customers to build parallel verticals as well as move forward to future designs.

Cadence ZAI provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for managing the design flow, and also includes a command-line interface (CLI) for more advanced users who prefer to work in a text-based environment.

Cerberus

Named the winner of Fast Company’s 2022 Next Big Things in Tech Awards, Cadence Cerebrus is an AI-powered solution that helps designers optimize their chip design flow. It uses reinforcement learning to automatically optimize the full flow to meet power, performance and area (PPA) goals. This can significantly reduce the time it takes to design a chip and improve the overall quality of the design. Cadence Cerebras can chip much faster and produce better products with fewer engineers. Introduced two years ago, Cadence Cerebras has generated significant gains in productivity and chip quality and cost, and Cadence has the data to prove it.

“Our customers are realizing transformative results with our broad Generative AI portfolio spanning Chip-Package-Board-System. With Cadence Cerebrus for example, customers have seen up to 60 percent improvement in uptime and approximately 40 percent less leakage, while engineering productivity has increased 10x,” said Nimish Modi, senior vice president and general manager, strategy and new ventures. Cadence Design System.

Renesas provided an example project where Cadence Cerebrus reduced design exploration time to one engineer over a period of 10 days, compared to traditional techniques that can take multiple engineers several months to finish the job. And Cadence was able to drive a 20% improvement in Cerebrus PPA.

Virtuoso Studio, now with AI

Cadence Virtuoso is a widely used electronic design automation (EDA) tool suite that includes a wide range of tools for designing, simulating, and verifying analog and mixed-signal circuits. Virtuoso is especially suited for designing high-performance analog and mixed-signal circuits, such as data converters, power management circuits, and RF circuits.

Recently introduced is the new Virtuso Studio, which incorporates generative AI technology into Flow. The foundry-supported solution eases the burden of process migration for schematics and layout. Tools within the Virtuoso ADE suite quickly refocus and validate designs after migration, so customers can achieve aggressive time-to-market goals. Customers can use AI-enabled tools to take existing IP and transform it for their next generation designs.

cadence varizium

Cadence Verisium is an AI-powered verification platform that helps designers optimize verification workloads, boost coverage, and accelerate root cause analysis of bugs. It is built on the Cadence Joint Enterprise Data and AI (JEDAI) platform, which enables Cadence to integrate its computational software innovations in data and AI across its entire portfolio of products and solutions. Verisium offers access to the following benefits:

• Increased Verification Productivity: Verisium can automate and accelerate many verification tasks, freeing up designers to focus on more creative and strategic work.
• Improved validation coverage: Verisium can help designers find bugs that would otherwise be missed, increasing the overall quality of the design.
• Quick Root Cause Analysis: Verisium can help designers quickly find the root cause of bugs, reducing the time it takes to fix them.

Verisium is fully integrated with JedAI, and can help automatically quantify failing tests and identify code differences between versions, speeding time to resolution, bug root-cause may help to identify.

Allegro-X AI

One area that Cadence has recently addressed with AI is printed circuit board (PCB) design work. Similar to the challenges in back-end chip physical layout, PCB design can be automated and improved with reinforcement learning. Cadence Allegro-X AI was introduced in April 2023 and uses AI to automate the placement and routing of components on PCBs. It offers many benefits, including:

• Short design time: Allegro-X AI can automate many of the manual steps involved in PCB design, significantly reducing the time it takes to complete a design.
• Superior Design Quality: Allegro-X AI can help designers create more optimal PCB layouts, leading to improved performance, reliability and manufacturability.
• Increased Design Productivity: Allegro-X can free AI designers to focus on more creative and strategic tasks instead of spending time on manual tasks.
• Enhanced Design Flexibility: Allegro-X AI can help designers explore more design options, which can lead to better overall designs.

Cadence Allegro-X AI has the potential to revolutionize the way PCBs are designed, and is already being used by leading companies in the electronics industry.

Optimum: Multi-Physics Optimization

Cadence Optimality is an AI-driven systems analysis and optimization solution that enables designers to explore 3D electromagnetic (EM) and high-speed signal and power integrity consequences and zero in on optimal design. It builds on the AI ​​capabilities first introduced to the market in Cadence Cerebras.

Cadence compatibility can be used to optimize a wide range of electronic systems, including integrated circuits, packages, PCBs, and even complete electronic systems. The optimal solution uses a combination of AI and traditional analysis and optimization algorithms to explore the design space and find the optimal solution. This can significantly reduce the time it takes to optimize a design and improve the overall quality of the design.

Here are some of the benefits enabled by Optimality:

• Increased Design Productivity: Optimum systems can automate many of the manual steps involved in analysis and optimization, which can significantly reduce the time it takes to complete a design.
• better design qualityOptimumness can help designers create more optimal system layouts, which can lead to better performance, reliability, and manufacturability.
• Enhanced Design Flexibility: Optimality can help designers explore more design options, leading to better overall designs.

“Insane” Performance, Says Nvidia CEO

During his keynote at Computex in late May, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlighted how the two companies are partnering to accelerate Cadence tools on Nvidia’s groundbreaking Grasshopper accelerated CPUs. “Nvidia is a big customer of Cadence. We use all of their tools. And all of their tools run on CPUs. And the reason they run on CPUs is that Nvidia’s datasets are very large, and the algorithms are refined over a very long period of time.” Happen,” Huang said. “We’ve been accelerating these applications for some time now, but now with Gracehopper – and we’ve only been working on it for a few days and weeks – the performance has accelerated, and I can’t wait to show it.” you can, is Mad,

conclusion

Cadence recently introduced several new AI-powered technologies at a user group meeting, and the widespread use of AI, primarily reinforcement learning, could serve as a step forward in design team productivity. After successful exploration over the past two years with Cadence Cerebras, the company is confident it knows how to help its customers speed up design time and produce products that use less energy, cost less do, and outperform chips designed without the help of AI tools.

AI will never take over the design process, but it has become a critical capability that helps design teams get work done and focus on high-value tasks that help their employer succeed in the marketplace. Let’s help.