chip designer thought leadership
Practical machine learning for chip designers Thought Leadership
Designers that spend their days creating new electronic chips push descriptions of their design through an elaborate flow of over 20 tools in order to get a verified product fabricated. Along the way, high-level concepts are captured in English-like programming descriptions that are transformed to lower and lower level abstractions until finally, they brush against the very limits of physics at almost the molecular level. For example, a graphics processor chip in a gaming computer can contain over 50 million transistors, yet its size is only 12 by 12 millimeters. Three grains of table salt stacked together are about 1 millimeter across. At each step in the flow, designers apply verification techniques to ensure that the design works as expected.