Will Silicon Valley’s disruptive innovation capabilities extend to car body manufacturing? In addition to pioneering the use of huge presses with 6,000 to 9,000 tons of clamping pressure, Tesla is reportedly exploring other new solutions to slash the cost of electric vehicles. Technologies being investigated include 3D printing, industrial sand, tailor-made alloys. According to the report, Musk’s goal is to find a way to cast the car’s underbody in one piece.

EDA and IP updates: Zuken, Altair, Ultra Librarian, Intel

Zuken has introduced a three-stage approach to AI-powered PCB design within its CR-8000 platform. The Autonomous Intelligent Place and Route product line introduces a new platform for AI-based place and route, which evolves in stages. “Basic Brain” learns from Zuken’s library of design examples and existing design expertise, and routes the design utilizing the product’s Smart Autorouter based on learned approaches and strategies. In the second stage, Zuken’s “Dynamic Brain” learns from the customer’s PCB designers, utilizing past design examples and integrating them into AI algorithms. The third and final stage is the “Autonomous Brain”, an AI-driven capability that self-improves with each project.

The Ultra Librarian CAD model library is now available to Altair users in several Altair ECAD verification and multiphysics solutions, including PollEx, SimLab, and Altair One UDE. Ultra Librarian gives users instant access to more than 16 million symbols, footprints from a cloud-based library.

And Ultra Librarian has developed a new AI-driven CAD modeling engine to drastically reduce the time it takes to build CAD models.

Intel is launching a new soft processor in the Nios V family targeting its FPGAs: the Nios V/c compact microcontroller – a free, soft-core IP, based on the Risc-V architecture. It will initially target all devices supported in Intel Quartus Prime Pro software with a roadmap to many devices supported in Quartus Prime Standard software.

(more…)

Arm’s Initial Public Offering is proving successful: share price increased almost 25% soon after the company’s Nasdaq listing, which translates into a $65 billion valuation. More themes this week include memory tiering in the datacenters and a new way to use AI in chip design.

AI-enhanced, cloud-based PCB design

The AI-in-EDA trend extends to PCB tools. The new Cadence OrCAD X Platform promises up to 5X faster PCB design thanks to generative AI automation to reduce placement time, and by leveraging Cadence OnCloud integration. According to Cadence, the solution is optimized for small and medium businesses, offering a new, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use PCB layout canvas.

New MLPerf benchmarks

MLPerf Inference v3.1 introduces two new benchmarks to the suite. The first is a large language model (LLM) using the GPT-J reference model to summarize CNN news articles. The second is an updated recommender, modified to be more representative of industry practices, using the DLRM-DCNv2 reference model and a much larger dataset. The latest MLPerf results also include, for the first time, the MLPerf Storage benchmark, which measures the performance of storage systems in the context of ML training workloads.

(more…)

The Chinese government will reportedly launch an additional state-backed investment fund aiming to raise about $40 billion for the domestic semiconductor industry. According to Reuters, individual Chinese chipmakers that have already received state subsidies include GTA Semiconductor, specializing in automotive applications, which was reportedly granted over $1.8 billion. Other updates related to the US-China tensions include the growing capability of Chinese chipmakers: more than half, maybe two-thirds of the chips contained in Huawei’s new high-end smartphone are made in China, according to Canadian reverse engineering firm TechInsights. Lastly, the Chinese government has reportedly told state employees to stop using their iPhones at work.

Synopsys unveils its big data analytics solution

Synopsys has extended its Synopsys.ai full-stack EDA suite with a comprehensive AI-driven data analytics continuum for every stage of chip development, leveraging the vast amounts of heterogeneous design data generated by EDA, testing, and IC fabrication tools – such as timing paths, power profiles, die pass/fail reports, process control, or verification coverage metrics. The AI-driven Synopsys EDA Data Analytics (.da) solution includes: Synopsys Design.da to perform deep analysis of data, to uncover PPA opportunities; Synopsys Fab.da to store and analyze large streams of fab equipment process control data, to maximize product quality and fab yield; Synopsys Silicon.da to collect petabytes of silicon monitor, diagnostic, and production test data from test equipment, to improve chip production metrics.

(more…)

Catching up on some of the news from the last thirty days or so, let’s start with the upcoming change of Synopsys’ top management: on January 1^st 2024, Sassine Ghazi will replace Aart de Geus as Synopsys’ Chief Executive Officer. Ghazi assumed the role of Synopsys COO in August 2020 and was appointed to the role of president in November 2021. De Geus (69), founded Synopsys in 1986.

Arm to go public

As previously announced, Arm is going public. On August 20, the company announced that it has publicly filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to its initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ARM”.

Nvidia Q2 record results

Nvidia reported record results for the second quarter ended July 30, 2023: global revenue was $13.51 billion, up 88% from Q1 and up 101% from year ago; Data Center revenue was $10.32 billion, up 141% from Q1 and up 171% from year ago. Nvidia has also announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud which will include the general availability of purpose-built Google Cloud A3 virtual machines powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs.

(more…)