Post Moore Era: The Trend Of EDA Development

As a key chip design tool, EDA software is a cornerstone of the integrated circuit industry. With the deepening of the domestic chip industry chain, the public's attention to upstream EDA is also rising.

In terms of volume, the global scale of EDA is about 10 billion US dollars. In the integrated circuit industry with hundreds of billions of dollars, although the market volume of EDA is small, it plays a very important supporting role. It is an essential basic tool in integrated circuit, which runs through various industrial chain links such as chip design, chip manufacturing, chip packaging and testing.

At present, in the global market, EDA market concentration is relatively high, and the three giants Synopsys, cadence and mentor (now Siemens EDA Department) occupy the main market share. Now, with Moore's law slowing down, the giants are also thinking about how to deal with the challenges of the post Moore era.

"With the evolution of technology to advanced process, we are pursuing three things: one is the lowest power consumption, the second is the best performance, and the third is the best cost. You will feel that in this process, it seems that there is no way to support the previous development by following Moore's law.", Sassine Ghazi, chief operating officer of Suntech, said in an interview with the 21st century economic report and other media, "in the past, the main problem was how many transistors should be added to the chip. It is a complexity of an order of magnitude. Now it is not only a technical bottleneck, but also a complexity in scale. The main reason is that if we follow the previous Moore's law, we can't keep up with the predictability, we can't afford the R & D investment, and the design is not so easy. "

In the face of increasingly complex chip design and production and other links, Suntech has proposed the concept of sysmoore, which refers to solving problems at the system level, not just at the level of the number of integrated transistors.

Beyond Moore's law

Guoxin Securities report points out that the complexity and integration of chips are rising, industrial division of labor and design costs are rising, making EDA software a necessary tool for the upstream of integrated circuits. Driven by Moore's law, a 5nm chip can hold 12.5 billion transistors, so we must rely on EDA tools to complete circuit design, layout design, layout verification and performance analysis; At the same time, according to IBS data, the cost of IC design has jumped from $51.3 million at 28nm to $542.2 million on 5nm chips. Often, a chip design start-up company may lose its life due to the failure of several times. The high cost of IC design also makes EDA software more important.

In the post Moore era, with the higher cost and more complex division of labor, there are higher requirements for EDA technology. Take Xinsi as an example. On the one hand, Xinsi puts forward sysmoore to surpass Moore's law in the new era, on the other hand, it is also "walking on two legs". While proposing new solutions, it will also improve in the field where Moore's law is still effective.

Sassine Ghazi introduced four major trends in the development of EDA industry in the post Moore era. "First, Moore's law does not disappear completely. The traditional Moore's law based on scale and volume is still a key point of many companies, which is the premise of profits. But there are new developments on this basis. For example, people pay more and more attention to its power performance in the design process, which is the second major trend. "

"The third big trend is the design of 2.5/3d multi wafer wafers," he said. One of its characteristics is that Moore's law has its limitations. On the one hand, our idea is to improve energy efficiency, on the other hand, we want to achieve system level packaging, that is, how to integrate more bare wafers into one package on a system level chip. One part of the integration follows Moore's law, while the other part is beyond Moore's law. Suntech has made a lot of IP modules that can be preset in advance and can be reused for direct combination. "

The fourth trend is to pursue the reliability of wafers. Sassine Ghazi mentioned that in the fields of automobile and super large-scale data center, wafer health monitoring should be carried out. At the same time, as the cost and content of software in the solution will certainly be more and more, we will make more use of AI technology and pay attention to security and security.

Talking about the goal of Suntech, sassine Ghazi said: "whether it's customers who rely on traditional Moore's law for chip design, or customers who have surpassed Moore's system level solution to chip design with sysmoore, we hope to increase their productivity by 1000 times."

Lower the threshold of chip design

In addition to the development of technology and technology, Ge Qun, global senior vice president and Chinese chairman of Suntech, told the 21st century economic reporter that "an important change in the role of EDA in the future is to lower the threshold of the whole chip design, so that more people can participate in the chip design."

He said that this is also the hope of Suntech in the future post Moore era by achieving the development of both sides. One is to solve the modeling and abstraction of the whole process, especially the silicon process; On the other hand, it can let more people participate in the chip design to meet the needs of continuous development.

Ge Qun says that the threshold of chip design is very high. "To do chip design, you need to graduate from EE, computer science or related majors. At the same time, you have to train for more than 5 to 10 years. About 15 years ago, if we optimized photos, we had to find someone who can do PS. now we all have a similar tool like Meitu XiuXiu, Be able to beautify your photos professionally without any training. "

In Ge Qun's opinion, more people entering chip design are also in line with the overall development needs of China (semiconductor), "because China's biggest advantage is that we have a lot of system requirements. If the demand of many good software companies breaks out, there will be more talent supply, or the threshold for talents will be lowered as in software industry, They use EDA tools like Xinsi to participate in the design of this chip, which can better release the development of China's entire industry in the future. "

According to the financial report, Suntech's global revenue in fiscal year 2020 was $3.7 billion, while the contribution of China market reached 11.4%. China has a huge chip consumption market, and international enterprises are also very keen on the new opportunities in the Chinese market, especially in the case of changing external environment, how to do a good job in localization is an important topic. At the research and development level, Xinsi has R & D centers in Shanghai and Wuhan, of which Wuhan is mainly responsible for developing IP modules and software security products.

On the other hand, Chinese enterprises are also speeding up their investment in EDA industry. In the view of insiders, domestic EDA is improving in all aspects of the industrial chain, but there is still a big gap between China and the giants in terms of the whole industrial chain and strength. In the future, in the domestic market, how the ecology of EDA will develop and how the cooperation between enterprises at home and abroad will be further observed.

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