From a chip to another, traveling through a package, a printed circuit board, and another package: the trip of a high-speed electric signal inside a system is fraught with perils. And avoiding that signals arrive weak and ‘dirty’ at their final destinations is just one of the system-level challenges facing designers today: with ever higher package densities, finer PCB traces, and higher frequencies, crucial aspects now include cooling, stress and more. At the system level, therefore, the interactions among electrical, mechanical, electromagnetic and thermal aspects can no longer be neglected. Unfortunately, the combination of so many different parameters generates an immensely large design space, that system designers are supposed to thoroughly explore to find the optimal solution.

Besides being very human-intensive and requiring a lot of time and computing resources, this task is often hindered by organizational ‘silos’ preventing collaboration among experts from different disciplines. Now a new solution from Cadence, called Optimality Explorer, promises a ten times faster system design optimization – with up to a 100X speedup on some designs – by applying artificial intelligence to a “Multi-disciplinary analysis and optimization” (MDAO) approach. Ben Gu, vice president of R&D for the Multiphysics System Analysis Business Unit at Cadence, described Optimality in the video interview he recently gave to EDACafe’s Sanjay Gangal; in this article we will add a few details, as well as the answers he provided to some additional questions.
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