Using AI Chips To Design Better AI Chips

Chip design is as much of an art as it is an engineering feat. With all of the possible layouts of logic and memory blocks and the wires linking them, there are a seemingly infinite placement combinations and often, believe it or not, the best people at chip floorplans are working from experience and hunches and they can't always give you a good answer as to why a particular pattern works and others don't. The stakes are high in chip design, and researchers have been trying to take the human guesswork out of this chip layout task and to drive toward more optimal designs. The task doesn't go away as we move towards chiplet designs, either, since all of those chiplets on a compute engine will need to be interconnected to be a virtual monolithic chip and all of the latencies and power consumption will have to be taken into effect for such circuit complexes. This is a natural job, it would seem, for AI techniques to help in chip design.