Bridging the Frontier 
Bob Smith, Executive Director
Bob Smith is Executive Director of the ESD Alliance responsible for its management and operations. Previously, Bob was senior vice president of Marketing and Business Development at Uniquify, responsible for brand development, positioning, strategy and business development activities. Bob began his … More » D2S Brings GPU Acceleration to Semiconductor Design and ManufacturingJune 24th, 2020 by Bob Smith, Executive Director
Aki Fujimura is a founder and CEO of D2S and a well-known and long-time member of the electronic design automation industry going all the way back to Tangent Systems in 1984. Tangent was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 1989 and that’s where Aki and I start our conversation. Bob: It’s been 31 years since Cadence acquired Tangent, a company you were a co-founder of along with Steve Teig, Terry Smith, Mark Flomenhoft, and Randy Smith, who died unexpectedly earlier this year. What impact did Tangent have on the industry and on you personally? Aki: Yeah, I miss Randy. Steve Teig and I got to work with a team of talented and dedicated engineers at Tangent to bring to market the first commercial place and route (P&R) software using “over the cell” routing designed to handle multi-layered process technology for ASICs and SOCs.
At the time, it was one of the key innovations along with synthesis and HDL in enabling the growth of the ASIC market in the early 1990s. After the acquisition, Cadence captured nearly 100% of the 3+ layer ASIC market. Not all acquisitions go as planned, so we were delighted to see the continued success. Thirty-one years later, I’m even more delighted to say that many of those innovations are still in use today such as fixed chip size, engineering change order, “over the cell” routing and LEF/DEF standard exchange format, to name a few. The early success in my career with Tangent opened many doors for me to come in and out of the industry, having gone on to Pure Software in the ‘90s and back to EDA with Simplex, which was also acquired by Cadence. I’ve been the CEO at D2S for 13 years now and I still use many lessons I learned from the days at Tangent.  Aki Fujimura Bob: What are some of those lessons? Aki: One aspect of it is the synergy created by exceptional teamwork, not just between Steve and me, and not just within Tangent, but particularly with partner companies. I heard Steve Jobs once say that you can’t just build what the customers are asking for today, and I agree wholeheartedly. You have to listen to the customers so much that you hear what they’re not saying. You have to create a progression in time from the needs of today to the needs of tomorrow, in each time frame matched by newly enabled capabilities that enhance what can be built. Sea of Gates first, followed by Sea of Cells, was an example. iPod to iPhone is a much more significant example. Another great example is Reed Hastings’ conception of NetFlix as a mail-order business knowing that the transition to streaming was coming, and building everything from the beginning from business model to technology to be compatible with that future. One who can not only see the future but see the progression into it without requiring the world to change for you today, has a much better chance to build a company that’s built to last. Bob’s note: Aki worked for Reed Hastings at Pure Software, a company Hastings founded in 1991 prior to NetFlix.. Bob: What are some of the industry trends you’re seeing? Aki: By now, nearly every industry –– including semiconductor manufacturing –– has recognized the potential of deep learning (DL). In semiconductor manufacturing, DL has already been applied in areas such as defect categorization and optical proximity correction (OPC). Defect categorization is a good example of using DL to speed up tedious and error-prone processes performed by human operators using visual pattern recognition. OPC is an example of an iterative optimization problem where runtime can be reduced 2x or more with enhanced quality of results using DL to generate a very good initial condition. DL is also used in OPC as an excellent and fast estimator of complex effects. DL will be leveraged in increasingly sophisticated ways in the coming decade. Manufacturing has shifted to using EUV for wafer lithography and multi-beam mask writers for advanced mask making. Once doubted, there is renewed commitment to Moore’s Law continuing at least until the 2nm node. Thanks in large part is due to computing techniques like DL that practice “useful waste” to leverage massive computational power to do things the best programmers in the world couldn’t do six years ago. This is a huge revolution in manufacturing capability that we just started to transition into. The previous generation of leading-edge mask writers based on variable-shaped beams (VSB) could only write axis-parallel rectangles efficiently. With multi-beam writing, there is no longer any shape restrictions. Any mask shape can be written just as efficiently. This changes everything. I see a future where logic designs become curvilinear, at least partially. Bob: So we can manufacture curvilinear designs already today? Aki: With the proliferation of multi-beam mask writing, the only missing link left to enabling the manufacture of curvilinear designs was full-chip curvilinear inverse lithography technology (ILT), which D2S brought to market in the past year. ILT has long been seen as the best way to maximize resilience to manufacturing variation for wafer lithography. Previous versions needed to output Manhattan shapes for variable shaped beam (VSB) mask writers. The new ILT we announced in a joint paper with Micron last September is the first commercial tool designed specifically for multi-beam writing. It makes extensive use of GPU acceleration to enable full-chip ILT. Previously, ILT could only be used for hotspots because runtimes were too long. Since ILT can now take curvilinear design shapes as the target wafer shapes, you’re right. Curvilinear designs can be manufactured now. Bob: How do you see curvilinear designs coming about? Is that going to require design and manufacturing to come closer together? Aki: I think of curvilinear design as a key paradigm for design and manufacturing coming together. Just the act of using curvilinear designs makes designs more manufacturable. Ninety-degree corners aren’t manufacturable on wafer, so it’s always been a proxy, not an exact specification. What would be an ultimate design-to-manufacturing collaboration is to design what can be manufactured. Even better would be a design that can be reliably manufactured, meaning that the design is more resilient to manufacturing variation. Designers will need less margins on parasitics, which in turn will contribute to tighter and faster designs that consume less power. It helps manufacturing to produce what the designers characterized to. Imec has started to talk about this, and I’m a believer. Curvilinear design is what’s needed to enable manufacturing-aware design, and allow manufacturing to make the wafer look much more like what the designer specified. Bob: Is our industry in the midst of reopening or was it open throughout the last three months with no slowdown due to the pandemic? Aki: We were preparing for work-from-home (WFH) when the shelter-in-place order came in our county. We are among the lucky ones that can do most of the work from home with internet-based communications, both internally and also with our customers and partners. So far, we’ve been able to work effectively. We miss in-person interactions. Teamwork and relationships are critical, and I feel like we’re drawing down on relationship deposits we had made in the past. Sooner or later, we’re going to be overdrawn, though. We have to be extra-empathetic in seeking to understand the other points of views, and make deposits whenever we can. A lot of how everyone needs to work and live in this new normal is by deploying more technology. I think that’s a part of why the semiconductor industry seems to be projecting a good 2021. Bob’s note: Aki and I wind down our conversation with a nod to food and wine. I am a co-owner of Jazz Cellars Winery, a producer of rich and complex hand-crafted wines, while Aki is co-owner of Plumed Horse, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Saratoga, Calif., currently closed due to COVID-19. Expected to reopen in early August, Plumed Horse is one of 87 restaurants in the world to be awarded the Grand Award by the Wine Spectator magazine. Jazz Cellars recently reopened its tasting room in Murphys, Calif. Thanks for your time today, Aki. To learn more about D2S, go to: www.design2silicon.com. About Aki Fujimura: Aki Fujimura is CEO of D2S. Previously, he was CTO at Cadence Design Systems, returning to Cadence for the second time through the acquisition of Simplex Solutions where he was President/COO and inside board member. Aki was an inside board member and vice president at Pure Software. Simplex and Pure both IPO’d during his tenure. He was a founding member of Tangent Systems in 1984, subsequently acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 1989. Aki holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT. Engage with the ESD Alliance at: Website: www.esd-alliance.org ESD Alliance Bridging the Frontier blog: http://bit.ly/2oJUVzl Twitter: @ESDAlliance |
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|||||
