With the rapid development of integrated circuits, how can China's emerging EDA ride the wind and waves?

From traditional fields such as information communications and industrial transportation to hot applications such as big data, AI, automatic driving, and 5G, chips are everywhere. Driven by Moore's Law, chip designs have become more complex and reliance on upstream EDA tools has become higher and higher. Professor Andrew .B Kahng of the United States statistically analyzed that without the use of EDA tools, it would cost about $7.7 billion to design a 28nm SoC, and with the EDA tools, this cost would drop to $40 million. This is undoubtedly an amazing calculation and highlights the importance of EDA software.

In recent years, with the rapid development of the domestic IC industry, a number of EDA startups have emerged, and Shanghai Hopmi Industrial Software Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as : Synomi Industrial Software) has also come into being. On October 12th, Synomi Industrial Software held a new product release and seminar on verification simulators in Pudong, Shanghai, Wei Shaojun, professor of the School of Integrated Circuits of Tsinghua University and chairman of the Design Branch of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, Zeng Xuan, a scholar of Fudan University, Li Xuanlin, director of the HiSilicon project group, He Zhiqiang, director of the ZTE Microelectronics Cable System Department, Zhang Yalin, founder and COO of Flint Technology, Liu Hun, senior vice president of Suoxi Technology, Zhang Tianfang, president of the PingtouGe Verification Technical Committee, and Mu Xi, chief verification architect and DVCON Wang Ding, chairman of China TPC, and other semiconductor industry veterans attended the meeting to talk with Synomi Gongsoft about the development and future of China's EDA.

Wei Shaojun, a professor at the School of Integrated Circuits at Tsinghua University and chairman of the Design Branch of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, pointed out that EDA is a typical technology-driven industry, and its development can be traced back to the 1980s. In the future, technology will continue to be the core competitiveness of EDA. However, China's role in this area still needs to be improved.

For a long time, China's lack of technical accumulation in integrated circuit design methodology has become one of the main factors restricting the development of domestic EDA tool systems. Wei Shaojun said that from the perspective of technological development, EDA cannot rely on only one company or one university, "it must comply with an open cooperation mechanism, so open international cooperation is inevitable." Even in the face of technical blockades, domestic manufacturers cannot close the door themselves. He pointed out that Huawei HiSilicon, ZTE Microelectronics and other companies present pointed out that it is a gratifying phenomenon that domestic independent EDA tools have been endorsed by head enterprises. Only through the deep interaction of its own technology with customer applications can an EDA software eventually become a competitive product with advantages in the international market.

World-class development experts gather to target the first commercial-grade simulator in China

Founded in March 2021, the company's entrepreneurial team comes from the international leading enterprises and outstanding people in the field of domestic innovation, and has the world's top EDA talents in the same field in China. Since its inception, the company has been working on the development of commercial-grade EDA tool products, such as the emulator UniVista Simulator (UVS).

Xu Yun, co-president of Hopmi Gongsoft, pointed out in his speech that the simulator is the core engine of the integrated circuit verification link, and it is also the most scarce part of the domestic EDA tool chain. In this field, Synomi Has a core R&D team with an average experience of 15-20 years. Starting from self-research and some commercial technology authorization, the team quickly launched the first commercial-level independent property rights simulator in China through a large number of developments in more than half a year, and at the same time received support from China's leading customers to help iterate and polish products. More than half a year has launched a commercial-grade simulator, reflecting EDA's Chinese speed. In the future, the product will continue to be iterated, optimized and rebuilt, gradually transitioning to a completely self-developed new architecture. Synomi Will continue to improve and expand application scenarios and functions, and successively launch new products to support industry needs and development.

Liu Jingjun, vice president of R&D of Hopmi Gongsoft, made a product launch introduction of "UVS - Flexible Adaptation Of High-Performance Simulators" at the meeting. The emulator is the most used tool and takes up the most computing resources by large IC design companies. Often, complex SoC chips contain hundreds of millions or even tens of billions of transistors, and more rapid and efficient design verification is a great test for design companies. Combined with the use of component-based loose coupling rapid development and iteration, reasonable use of emerging technologies to carry out independent research and development of key technologies, the launch of the first generation of commercial function simulator products, suitable for a variety of client application scenarios. UVS supports Verilog, UVM and the System Verilog language part it contains, and the simulation performance is comparable to that of current international commercial simulator products. The product has now been tried by well-known companies in the industry.

In the trial sharing report of He Zhiqiang, director of the ZTE Microelectronics Cable System Department, the reporter learned that UVS can support a variety of complex SystemVerilog syntax and data types. In terms of performance, the simulation speed has reached or even better than other emulators, and the compilation speed is expected to be further optimized. Moreover, the R&D team of Hopmisoft soft responds in a timely manner and can quickly solve the problem.

The domestic IC design and software industry continues to develop towards high quality, and increasingly requires emerging EDA companies to provide autonomous and controllable, end-to-end full-process solutions to provide customers with better verification efficiency and verification completeness.

For the demands of the EDA industry, Li Xuanlin, director of hiSilicon project group, proposed in the report that only by achieving the sustainable supply and competitiveness of EDA software can the problem of EDA card neck be truly solved. In terms of competitiveness, although there is still a gap with foreign benchmark software, The ability of Synomi Gongsoft to quickly launch a digital emulator version with good basic performance is very worthy of the industry's attention. At the same time, only by using all self-developed or open source components can we achieve long-term continuous supply in the future, and the plan of Unimi Gongsoft UVS in the independent innovation of core engines is worth looking forward to. In addition to the core engine, verilog/SV Parser, a key component required by various EDA tools, has relied on U.S. companies to provide due to the complexity of the scene and the large workload. Huawei has developed Verilog/SV Parser, which is planned to be open to partners to jointly solve the EDA card neck problem.

The opportunity for the development of the "core" industry is coming The demand for independent research and development of EDA is imminent

According to the data, the global EDA market size in 2020 is about 11.4 billion US dollars, and the three giants of the United States maintain a share of 68% of the global market, and the oligopoly pattern is further clarified. In contrast, China, as the world's largest IC consumer market, accounts for less than 10% of the global EDA market.

Under the influence of multiple factors such as geopolitics and the epidemic, countries are paying more and more attention to the autonomy and controllability of strategic industries such as chips, and it is imperative to improve the self-sufficiency rate of supporting commercial-grade EDA software.

In this regard, Liu Hun, senior vice president of Suoxi Technology, said at the final roundtable forum that the global $460 billion semiconductor market is based on the EDA support of the $11 billion market, from the perspective of the neck of the technology card, EDA is critical, and the threshold is very high, and the global talent is relatively scarce. "It is very necessary for local companies to do EDA," he stressed.

However, compared with international giants, local companies still face three restrictions, such as technology, market capacity and long customer acceptance cycle. Liu Hun pointed out that the scale of local EDA is very small and there is a lot of room for growth, but if everything starts from scratch, the cycle is bound to be very long. However, if we can embrace the high-end talents in related fields with an open mind, based on our strong research and development strength, and make full use of some mature and reliable commercial technologies and some innovative open source technology modules, this will be a very feasible and controllable way. It is reported that this is also the phased development model initially chosen by the establishment of Synomi Gongsoft.

Wang Ding, chief verification architect of Muxi and chairman of DVCON China TPC, also said that open source technology can fully reflect the actual needs of users and differentiated innovative ideas, and the essence of open source technology integrated into mature commercial products is to make EDA startups more grounded, know what users think, and reach what users want.

Zhang Yalin, founder and COO of Flint Technology, said that the current development model of Hopsun Gongsoft is based on the combination of rapid product iteration and customer launch, which is a very pragmatic model and a very novel model. As for whether this is the correct development idea of the current EDA start-ups, Zhang Tianfang, chairman of the Pingtou Brother Verification Technical Committee, believes that evaluating and selecting open source technologies that are conducive to commercial-grade product development can achieve the effect of doubling the results with half the effort, avoiding unnecessary expenses caused by repeated wheel building, and reducing the cost of commercial-grade product development of start-ups.

In addition, taking the verification track that See Gongsoft first cut into as an example, the verification runs through the entire IC design process, especially for advanced process nodes, which determines the success of the project and is also an important support for chip signoff (issuance).

Liu Hun said that the platform ASIC business is a feature of Suoxi, which requires a lot of front-end verification work to support, and the Chinese business accounts for a large proportion of Suoxi's global business, from this point of view, it will actively support the development of local EDA enterprises. Compared with the top three companies, the advantages of local EDA companies are in terms of response speed and resource allocation, as well as support for specific characteristics of the tool.

In addition, in terms of teachers and talents, China still has a considerable gap compared with the United States. Zeng Xuan, a scholar at Fudan University, expressed his own view that talent training cannot be just a question of what courses to study in school. She believes that talent training should be a combination of production, education and research, and talents must follow the project. As for whether such a broader cooperation mechanism can be formed to jointly solve the problem of talent shortage, it may become the key to building a talent echelon. At the same time, Hemi Gongsoft also said that it is necessary to attach importance to the training of joint talents with universities, and a steady stream of excellent fresh blood is the basis for creating an EDA ecology.

Although in the view of Hopan Gongsoft, the research and development of EDA tools, the main process with independent intellectual property rights, cannot be achieved overnight. However, looking forward to the future, this locally based EDA company will continue to aggregate industry leaders and resources from all parties to create a new generation of world-class industrial software, serve Chinese and global customers with innovative technologies and application models, and work with industry partners to jointly promote the sustainable and healthy development of China's chip industry.