Synopsys And Microsoft Collaborate To Create 'Copilot' For Computer Chip Design

Copilot helps design computer chips. (photo: dock.microsoft)

JAKARTA - Microsoft mostly markets its "Copilot" as a way to help complete a row of computer codes or quickly summarize messy email entry boxes. However, on Wednesday, November 15, Synopsys said they had teamed up with Microsoft to create their own Copilot to help design computer chips.

Chip design is one of the most difficult tasks in the tech industry because billions of transistors - small switches that can be turned on and turned off - must be arranged with precision on a piece of silicon which is only a few centimeters wide. Designing chips usually costs hundreds of millions of dollars and takes several years, even with an engineering team.

Synopsys is the largest software maker used in the process and said on Wednesday that it used Microsoft's Azure OpenAI system to make their own Copilots used with their tools. The early stages of complex chip design involve engineers in describing how the chip should work in a language similar to software programming code.

Synopsys trains this system by using a large data warehouse that they have accumulated over the decades of doing business to help in the process.ctional Krishnatasthy, General Manager of the design automation group at Synopsys, said that its main goal was to make the system accurate.

"If the AI bot writes essays or literary or poetry, you can have a 10%-to-15% error and your consumers will still be impressed," Krishnatasthy said. "But if you don't produce (chip design work) that's more than 99.9% accurate, you're introducing bugs to your chips, which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars."

Fixing bugs is one of the longest and most expensive parts of the chip design process. Microsoft said it had started testing the Synopsys system with their own internal chip design team, which on Wednesday introduced their company's first internal data center chip.

"This technology not only helped us overcome problems from the start, but also reduced costs for fixing problems at a further stage," said Erik Berg, principal engineer at the chip design verification and validation team at Microsoft, in a blog post.