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Sergei Surabekyants
Microchip design is a complex and painstaking job. AI has been able to help create new chips for data centers, smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Synopsys, an electronics and chip design software company, announced that its DSO.ai tool has already successfully helped develop hundreds of chips, and expects the upward trend to continue.
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An AI tool from Synopsys has enabled companies such as STMicroelectronics and SK hynix to accelerate semiconductor development in an increasingly competitive environment. Over the past few years, the demand for new chips has increased, and development costs have skyrocketed. Tools like DSO.ai are designed specifically to reduce design costs by doing the chore of optimizing the layout of chip components instead of human engineers.
Hundreds of developed chip designs after AI processing have shown a reduction in power consumption of up to 25% with a threefold increase in the productivity of engineers. SK hynix reports that the use of DSO.ai reduced the area of the memory cell by 15% and reduced the overall die size by 5%. DSO.ai is especially useful when designing layouts for multi-chip solutions, which requires a lot of routine work.
Synopsys claims that DSO.ai doesn’t take anyone’s jobs (yet), but it can automate tedious, repetitive work that takes up engineering time, allowing people to focus on real innovation and new projects. For example, AI-assisted chip design could allow companies that don’t have a lot of engineers to develop more advanced chips. However, no technology that automates the work that humans used to do has resulted in more jobs for humans.
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With all the latest innovations in the field of artificial intelligence, the creation process is drastically changing. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, now built into Microsoft products, can write stories, generate computer code, and answer search queries in natural language. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Dall-E is beating human creators in art competitions. AI is also used in games and 3D technologies such as NVIDIA’s DLSS frame rate upscaling. AI is no longer an abstract idea – more and more often the fruits of AI labor are found in everyday life. So far this is good. What will happen next?
