Sassine Ghazi, president and CEO of Synopsys, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss how AI is transforming chip design and engineering. What follows are excerpts from a keynote interview at SEMICON West this week, which was conducted before a live audience.

SE: The big change over the past year, and really the big story right now, is AI. We’re processing more AI data. Chips need to run faster. They need to run cooler. Do we really need to rethink how we’re developing these chips?

Ghazi: Absolutely. Actually, we started talking about how to re-engineer engineering, because you need to co-design and optimize across multiple intersections, starting at the physics level, material, process technology, architecture, design, along with the software and the model itself, because the model itself is what’s defining the workload, and how do you optimize along that stack?

SE: So where does AI actually fit into chip design? We’ve been dealing with computational software since what, the 1980s?

Ghazi : Yes. Around the 2016 time frame, we introduced reinforcement learning in a number of our technologies and tools to take advantage of a large space of parameters that you need to optimize, and to use AI to assist the human engineer in optimizing that large space. Today, we’ve moved from an assistant to an actual orchestration of multiple task agents. We have more than 40 task agents. Those task agents are experts of the tools, where you feed them all the knowledge, the capabilities that the tools need in order to optimize for a certain outcome.

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