Synopsys rolls out new software tools for designing AI chips

Synopsys on Wednesday rolled out new software tools to handle the fast-increasing complexity of designing artificial intelligence chips, the first wave of new offerings after its $35 billion buyout of engineering software firm Ansys.

Synopsys, which announced the new tools at a conference in ‌Silicon Valley, has ⁠for ⁠decades been one of the main suppliers of software used in determining how to arrange the tens of billions of transistors that make up chips from firms such as Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, which last year invested in $2 billion Synopsys. But flagship offerings from AMD and Nvidia are no longer a ⁠single chip ‌at all, but instead many smaller “chiplets” stacked and packaged together in increasingly complicated ways.