AXELERA AI SELECTS ANSYS SIMULATION SOFTWARE FOR EDGE AI PLATFORM CHIP

Axelera AI, a provider of powerful and advanced solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) at the Edge, selected Ansys simulation software for digital power integrity signoff of its high-performance Metis AI Processing Unit (AIPU). This effort is part of Axelera AI’s work with Ansys to build its recently released Metis AI platform, a hardware and software platform for computer vision AI inference at the edge. The technology delivers advanced acceleration performance and usability at a fraction of the cost and power consumption of solutions available today.

Logical chip interactions across various power and clock domains have the potential to cause chip failures. Axelera AI needed to validate its Metis AIPU, which contained as many as 100 million gates, or simple switching circuits, along with different clock and power domains responsible for executing operations essential to a digital circuit. These interactions were difficult to analyze using traditional tools and methods, which lacked accuracy, and proved too time-consuming and resource intensive.

Axelera AI developed a top-down, two-step workflow enabled by Ansys software to understand floorplan quality and IR drop. First, the software was used to prefetch or transfer numerous weaknesses in various integrated circuit schematics that would have delayed the manufacturing process. Next, drop analysis was completed using Ansys simulation to uncover problems impacting chip quality, then to quickly iterate on and execute fixes to minimize unanticipated voltage drops that lead to circuit failure.