Everything Is Getting Smarter And AI Is Enabling Us To Do Much More

AI isn’t just a buzzword any longer. AI is being used everywhere from silly photo filters in phone apps, to recommendation engines, autonomous vehicles, big data analytics and advanced design automated design tools like DSO.ai. Specialized chips with dedicated AI processors reside almost everywhere including your smartphone, computers, and the in latest automotive tech. Now, the chip industry itself has reached a stage where AI is aiding in the design of these AI chips, and it is enabling engineering teams of all sizes to compete at the relentless pace required in the semiconductor industry.

“With Classic Moore’s Law, we saw an unbelievable push in scale complexity that finally made AI possible. Now every vertical market seeks to extract economic value from their data by making everything smart. This has created a pull on the semiconductor industry to deliver another 1000X to tackle the systemic complexity that ‘smart everything’ creates. But 1000X means overcoming levels of design complexity that far exceed human engineering capability and economic means today”, de Geus said.

Renowned engineer Jim Keller recently said, “It’s a bloody miracle; ten years ago you couldn’t do a hardware startup”. Keller was referencing advancements in design automation by Synopsys (and others) that have altered the economics and manpower necessary to launch innovative hardware startups. And back in March, NUVIA – a young company with approximately 100 engineers – was acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. This illustrates what’s currently possible with these powerful new chip design tools and intelligent strategies. The old semiconductor paradigms are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Today, it’s about the best transistors, architectures, and accelerators for the job, and the human-constrained physical design engineering effort no longer has to be a gating factor.