Periodic Reporting for period 1 - hyperPV (HyperPV, the first GPU-Powered Physical Verification Framework with High Performance Computing capabilities.)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2023-01-02 do 2024-01-01
Context
We live in a digital world that fully relies on chips or semiconductor circuits. 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 (IC). However, significant drawbacks exist:
• Not only there is an ongoing chip shortage globally, but the complexity to sign-off a chip is growing exponentially (current 7nm processes in production need approximately 20,000 rules and more than 100,000 operations) which impacts the IC verification time (weeks).
• 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 7nm design of 1B transistors requires at least 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 (GPGPU’s) 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 will finally be able to accelerate the physical verification of their IC’s 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 100’s 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 will be tested across multiple pilots with semiconductor companies. The aim is to validate 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 semiconductor foundry certification for rules qualification on target semiconductor technologies. 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 new patents.
We live in a digital world that fully relies on chips or semiconductor circuits. 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 (IC). However, significant drawbacks exist:
• Not only there is an ongoing chip shortage globally, but the complexity to sign-off a chip is growing exponentially (current 7nm processes in production need approximately 20,000 rules and more than 100,000 operations) which impacts the IC verification time (weeks).
• 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 7nm design of 1B transistors requires at least 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 (GPGPU’s) 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 will finally be able to accelerate the physical verification of their IC’s 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 100’s 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 will be tested across multiple pilots with semiconductor companies. The aim is to validate 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 semiconductor foundry certification for rules qualification on target semiconductor technologies. 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 new patents.
Within the reporting period, AMSIMCEL has focused on finalizing and optimizing the HyperPV rule checking engine. In parallel, AMSIMCEL has been working closely with external partners to implement the technology decks focusing on 45nm proprietary semiconductor process, which enables the foundry validation of HyperPV.
AMSIMCEL has secured a new customer to commence a pilot in the second year of the project, reaching a total of 2 on-going pilot projects. Moreover, the company has signed a technology transfer agreement with a semiconductor foundry in France to 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 a tool license and user management module administered from a web-dashboard.
AMSIMCEL has secured a new customer to commence a pilot in the second year of the project, reaching a total of 2 on-going pilot projects. Moreover, the company has signed a technology transfer agreement with a semiconductor foundry in France to 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 a tool license and user management module administered from a web-dashboard.
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 will be able to satisfy industry 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 technology.
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 will be able to satisfy industry 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 technology.