President of Synopsys: With the development of autonomous driving to L5, the cost of chips will increase by 50 times|Deep Network

Source: Visual China

Author | Zhang Rui

Edit | Kang Xiao

As wafer fabrication moves into the 3nm deep water region, increasing the number of transistors following Moore's Law is no longer the best option for improving chip performance.

The so-called Moore's Law means that every two years or so, the density of transistors on the chip will double, and the performance of the chip will double. In the past few decades, under the influence of Moore's Law, the chip manufacturing process has developed from 130nm to 3nm.

Now that the miniature scheme of the traditional Moore's Law is approaching the physical limit, can the upstream of the industrial chain continue to give Moore's Law life?

In this regard, Sassine Ghazi, president of Synopsys, said at the 2023 Synopsys developer conference, "From a technical point of view, Moore's Law has not yet come to an end. But with the improvement of chip manufacturing process, especially after 14 nm/16 nm, the manufacturing cost per square millimeter has increased exponentially. ”

EDA software is a necessary software tool for chip design and is known as the "mother of chips". Synopsys is a leader in EDA and semiconductor intellectual property (IP) with a portfolio of solutions for system-level design, IP, design implementation, verification, manufacturing, optical design, software development testing, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). At present, the high-end software EDA of global chip design is basically monopolized by three major companies: Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor.

In Sassine's view, there are two main ways for the industry to cope with the slowdown of Moore's Law: one is to optimize for "scale complexity", that is, to improve the overall performance of SoC chips by improving the performance of AI acceleration chips, GPUs, and CPUs; The second is to optimize for "system complexity", comprehensively considering the intersection of scale and system complexity (SysMoore is called by Synopsys), such as 3DIC or advanced packaging or multi-die developed and launched by Synopsys.

On the surface, advanced packaging and multi-die die systems are similar concepts, that is, a feature-rich and large-area die is split into multiple dies, and these dies with specific functions are combined together in the form of advanced packaging to form a system-on-chip.

Currently, Synopsys can provide a unified platform for multi-die integration through 3DIC Compiler, providing an integrated ultra-convergence environment for 3D visualization, pathing, exploration, design, implementation, verification, and signoff.

At this year's Synopsys developer conference, Sassine highlighted the role of multi-die systems in AI fields such as high-performance computing servers and autonomous driving.

Automotive electronics currently account for 13% of the total multi-die chip system share for a variety of reasons and are growing rapidly. If the complexity of the car increases from L0 and L1 to L4 and L5, the overhead of semiconductors in the car will increase by 50 times to enable autonomous driving, advanced driver assistance (ADAS) type of connected cars. 50x overhead is not a small amount, so hardware complexity and affordability can be a huge challenge.

In the case of L2 advanced assisted driving, it can be implemented simply using some of the earlier technologies. Modules including CPUs and GPUs need to be completed on the same technology node. But by L4, whether it's AI chips, CPUs, GPUs for computing, or connecting advanced memory, or networking, it's much more complex and intelligent.

"We can take the popular multi-die approach and choose which features require state-of-the-art technology and which can be 16nm or 7nm and combine them in one system and into one package. Synopsys noticed 5 or 6 years ago that innovation in the industry is turning to this trend. It is estimated that by 2026, about 20% of system-on-a-chip will be poly-die or 3DIC technology, and by 2030, this proportion will rise to 40%. Sassine Ghazi said.

To provide automakers with comprehensive virtualization and test solutions, Synopsys has completed the acquisition of PikeTec, a software test and validation solution provider for automotive control unit systems.