HyperPV, the first GPU-Powered Physical Verification Framework with High Performance Computing capabilities.

Project Information

hyperPV

Grant agreement ID: 190125922

DOI

10.3030/190125922

Project closed

EC signature date 15 December 2022

Start date 2 January 2023

End date 1 July 2025

Funded under

• The European Innovation Council (EIC)

Total cost

€ 3 698 758,75

EU contribution

€ 2 500 000,00

Coordinated by

AMSIMCEL SRL
Romania

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - hyperPV (HyperPV, the first GPU-Powered Physical Verification Framework with High Performance Computing capabilities.)

Reporting period: 2024-01-02 to 2025-07-01

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

We live in a digital world that fully relies on semiconductor chips or integrated circuits (IC). Chip making - from idea to electronic device - is a very complex process which is split into design phase, design verification phase and production phase.
A chip takes several months to manufacture with one third of the time spent in verifying the design before production. Verification of the design is a critical step in the chip making process that consists in validating that the chip will behave according to specifications. If anything goes undetected, semiconductor producers will face huge losses.

Currently, there exist software tools that assist semiconductor companies in the verification of Integrated Circuits. However, significant drawbacks exist:
• The complexity of signing off a chip is growing exponentially (7nm processes need > 20k rules and >100k operations when compared to a 180nm process, which needs few hundreds of rules). This aspect significantly impacts the IC verification time: many cycles are required for design closure, where only one design rule checking (DRC) cycle takes weeks to run on a huge amount of resources (100+ CPUs).
• To increase the verification speed, semiconductor producers buy dozens of tools and use large CPU farms to run them in parallel, leading to a high economic burden and energy consumption: a current state-of-art 3nm design of 1B transistors requires more than 300-CPUs running for more than 400 CPU-months.
• CPU technology has reached a level of development where it is not possible to cope with more complex chip designs. Demand for lower cost tools is growing, together with High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments.

AMSIMCEL’s HyperPV solution
AMSIMCEL brings the unprecedented General Purpose Graphic Processor Units (GPGPUs) acceleration capabilities into the next generation of IC design for Physical Design Verification (PV) within the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) market.
AMSIMCEL’s breakthrough solution (HyperPV) is the first GPU-based PV Framework thanks to which semiconductor companies are finally be able to accelerate the physical verification of their ICs and maximize their production. HyperPV consists of two products: HyperDRC and HyperCloud. HyperDRC is a HPC Design Rule Checking engine enabling substantial acceleration of PV.
HyperPV relies on a new set of innovative features set to disrupt the current EDA market:
• Innovative algorithm: proprietary computational geometry library designed from the ground up to enable massive parallelization and scalability on modern processor architectures.
• Light-speed engine (HyperDRC): fast DRC engine targeting GPU massive parallel computing power. GPU-based HyperPV accelerates PV multiple times while preserving the same accuracy of top CPU-based solutions.
• High scalability (HyperCloud): First PV SaaS framework that enables seamless deployment on premise and on commercial GPU clouds allowing HyperPV to achieve near-linear scalability for 100s of GPU nodes.

EIC project objectives
Within the EIC Accelerator grant project, AMSIMCEL sets to complete the optimization of HyperPV for the production ready environment and the validation of HyperPV performance and interoperability within existing EDA ecosystems. AMSIMCEL’s innovative solution has been tested across multiple pilots with semiconductor companies. Multiple strategic partners have validated the sustained design verification acceleration across multiple design sizes (in the billion transistors range) and scalability for 100 GPUs).
Furthermore, AMSIMCEL will carry out the necessary processes to obtain the ISO certification for Quality Management System and validate HyperPV in a foundry environment. Semiconductor foundry certification will enable the increased confidence in HyperPV tool and encourage adoption of the tool by new customers.
AMSIMCEL’s technology will be protected through additional patents.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the project time, AMSIMCEL finalized and optimized the HyperPV rule-checking engine, achieving foundry-level validation on a proprietary semiconductor process. The company expanded market traction with two ongoing pilot projects, enabling real-world benchmarking against existing solutions, and validated the tool in a foundry environment. To support customers, a web-based license and user management module was developed, and the company obtained ISO 9001:2015 certification, reinforcing its commitment for customers quality and industry standards. Moreover, the company is pursuing additional technology transfer agreements with a semiconductor foundry in France to further proceed with the validation of the HyperPV tool.
Finally, to help future customers to manage and follow the evolution of their verification project, the team implemented and released an end-to-end integration feature with existing EDA ecosystems.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Nowadays chip manufacturers need to engineer more complex solutions to satisfy the challenges raised by the advent of AI, 6G, data centers, and autonomous transportation. This leads to serious limitations as current verification methods target only CPU-based technologies unable to deliver the required speed and complexity of computation. In this regard, AMSIMCEL envisions a future where High Performance Computing technologies coupled with AI will be able to satisfy industry’s speed requirements, breaking the current paradigm of the sector and enabling Europe to be on track for technological sovereignty. In this regard, the first steps have already been taken, where circuit simulators (Fast Spice) and electromagnetic simulations are performed using GPU acceleration. Many other steps in the EDA toolchain may benefit from GPU acceleration similarly to the HyperPV engine, i.e. in digital verification, place & route, timing analysis, static checking, etc.
Furthermore, moving outside EDA borders, AMSIMCEL envisions its computational library to replace traditional libraries used by CAD/CAM software that need to be migrated to the cloud. Currently, there are a lot of tools that rely on computational libraries. Once AMSIMCEL validates the performance of the current approach, it envisions a new revenue stream by integrating the HPC library in various CAD/CAM tools.
Finally, AMSIMCEL will also contribute to the European Green Deal targets by offering the potential of lowering energy consumption compared to current CPU-heavy technology.

Evolution of Fabrication Rules [1]

HyperPV System Architecture

Design Rule Checks with the HyperPV Environment