NVIDIA Shows How AI Plays A Prominent Role In Optimizing & Accelerating Chip Designs By Up To 30x

wccftech.com:

NVIDIA has revealed that they are leveraging AI to optimize and accelerate next-generation chip designs by up to 30x.

On the NVIDIA Developer blog, authors and developers Anthony Agnesina and Mark Ren posted a technical walkthrough of how Automated DREAMPlace-based Macro Placement, or AutoDMP, assists with designing chips utilizing GPUs and artificial intelligence. A companion paper (PDF), "AutoDMP: Automated DREAMPlace-based Macro Placement," was published a day before by Agnesina and others for the International Symposium on Physical Design this year. Their research showed that AutoDMP could optimize 2.7 million cells and 320 macros in three hours using the NVIDIA DGX Station A100.

The process of AutoDMP is to be connected to a platform used by chip manufacturers called an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) system. The two work together in tandem to increase the process that older systems would take, trying to locate specific areas for the initial design of the CPU. In one of the demonstrations of the power of AutoDMP, the placement tool created a 256 RSIC-V core layout that incorporated 320 memory macros and 2.7 million normal cells. This process saved the development team an immense amount of time by solving the challenge in roughly three hours.

 Macro placement has a tremendous impact on the landscape of the chip, directly affecting many design metrics, such as area and power consumption. Thus, improving the placement of these macros is critical to optimizing each chip’s performance and efficiency.

— NVIDIA Developer blog post, "AutoDMP Optimizes Macro Placement for Chip Design with AI and GPUs"

What is fascinating is that this process was initially manually designed, with macros decisively placed based on previous