Siemens fuels custom IC flows with artificial intelligence

The Solido Design Environment from Siemens Digital Industries Software is one of the latest EDA toolsets looking to harness the advantages of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically for the design and verification of increasingly complex custom ICs.

The environment undertakes AI-accelerated nominal and variation-aware analysis, including SPICE-level circuit simulation setup, measurements and regresssions, waveforms and statistical results analysis. It is intended for teams working on standard cell, memory and analog IP designs.

It draws upon three branches of AI:

• Adaptive AI is used to power accurate statistical yield verification to six-sigma and higher.
• Additive AI accelerates verification by a further 10X to 100X
• Assistive AI boosts engineering productivity by 5-10X for PPA (power, performance and area) and yield optimization.

By using these techniques – and particularly by leveraging the greater maturity of adaptive and additive techniques – Solido is looking to displace traditional brute-force Monte Carlo techniques.

Figure 1. How the Solido Design Environment fits into Siemens custom portfolio (Siemens EDA)

“The Solido Design Environment software and the variation-aware verification capabilities have significantly benefited our design flow,” said Randy Caplan, chief executive officer for Silicon Creations.

“Its ability to quickly and accurately identify potential issues at high sigma, as well as to provide insights on optimizing our designs to work at a high degree of robustness, have been helpful to designers as we continue to provide world-class design IP to our customers.”

The environment has already been optimized for scalable use in the cloud though agreements between Siemens and leading providers AWS and Azure. Templates and flight plans for cloud usage are also available.

The Solido Design Environment joins the existing Solido Characterization Suite and IP Validation features within the Siemens custom IC platform alongside Analog FastSpice and Symphony.

It is immediately available. The tool will also be part of the Siemens portfolio at this week’s Design Automation Conference in San Francisco.