Google is using AI to design chipsets in just six hours

The new chips are said to be superior or comparable to those produced by humans in all key metrics including power consumption, performance and chip area.

Google is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to design the next generation chipset

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Google is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to design the next generation chipset. And the AI is taking only six hours to design, faster than human designers who take months.

"In under six hours, our method automatically generates chip floorplans," Google said.

Chip floorplanning refers to designing the physical layout of a computer chip. Despite decades of research, chip floorplanning has defied automation, requiring months of intense effort by physical design engineers to produce manufacturable layouts.

The new chips are said to be superior or comparable to those produced by humans in all key metrics including power consumption, performance and chip area.

To achieve this, the designers posed chip floorplanning as a reinforcement learning problem, and developed a neural network capable of learning representations of the chip.

The method utilised past experience to become better and faster at solving new instances of the problem.

This allows artificial agents producing the chip to gain more experience than any human designer.

Published - June 14, 2021 12:36 pm IST