Semiconductor Engineering .:. Big Data Meets Chip Design

The amount of data being handled in chip design is growing significantly at each new node, prompting chipmakers to begin using some of the same concepts, technologies and algorithms used in data centers at companies such as Google, Facebook and GE. While the total data sizes in chip design are still relatively small compared with cloud operations--terabytes per year versus petabytes and exabytes--it's too much to sort through using existing equipment and approaches. "You can take many big data approaches to handle this, but there may be a business problem if you do," said Leon Stok, vice president of EDA at IBM. He said EDA doesn't have the kind of concentrated volume necessary to drive these kinds of techniques, and typically that problem is made worse because the data is often different between design and manufacturing. But for those working on designs, the amount has grown significantly at a time when extracting key data in various parts of the design flow is crucial.