Why design a chip yourself when artificial intelligence can do it for you: Samsung is the first to take advantage of that idea

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How do you place the billions of transistors and the tracks that interconnect them in a processor? These chips are normally designed by engineers with extensive experience in this field, but now there is a new trend on the market: that those chips are designed by artificial intelligence.

It is precisely what it has done Samsung, which has worked with the Synopsys company, specialized in AI algorithms for chip design, with the aim of creating a commercial Exynos family processor that benefits from the virtues of this particular algorithm.

Don’t design that chip, an algorithm already does it for you

Although others like Google or NVIDIA also seem to have worked in this area, Samsung is the first to really take advantage of a system called DSO.ai developed by Synopsys. The company, which works with dozens of semiconductor manufacturers, could become a major player in chip design in the short to medium term.

The goal of these AI-based chip design systems is accelerate the development of new chips and discover promising new designs, and for this, Synopsys has at its disposal the designs that for years have made it possible to create powerful microprocessors.

What Synopsys has done is “train” its algorithm with these designs. Thanks to the so-called reinforcement learning – the same one that DeepMind used with AlphaGo -, the firm already explained in June how a manufacturer of integrated circuits in the United States has achieved increase the performance of a chip by 15% thanks to this software.

Samsung has not confirmed If the latest Exynos 2100 presented in their devices take advantage of precisely those designs based on artificial intelligence, but the truth is that those responsible for Synopsys are enthusiastic.

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Aart de Geus, co-CEO of the company, explained how “a little over a year and a half ago we were able for the first time to achieve the same results in just a few weeks that a team of experts would have achieved in several months. ”

The statement is certainly promising, but we will see if this trend ends up marking the future of a segment that of course benefits from help now that physical limits of photolithography pose significant barriers to increasingly advanced chip design.