Everything we know about Siemens' Solido Design Environment Software
Siemens Digital Industries Software has a deep catalog of tools for integrated circuit (IC) designers, spanning from C-level design entry to dedicated systems for design, manufacturing and physical verification and signoff. But the newest addition to the family is the Solido Design Environment, a verification tool that Siemens claims uses AI functions to optimize workflows and save engineers valuable time.
Autonomous vehicles and networked consumer products continue to change the way we think of designing and developing products. If everything must be smart and connected, then everything probably needs electronics design simulation. As the demands on these systems become greater, the chips are being asked to do more things better than ever before. You can almost imagine the meeting where the managers tell chip designers: “your chips are great, but we need them to go faster, fit within a smaller footprint, use power more efficiently and be easier to manufacture.”
This is where the Solido Design Environment might be helpful. It is not doing anything completely brand new from an AI or chip design perspective—but by combining these functions together Siemens hopes to shake up the chip design process. The idea is to listen to the needs of the customer and managers in the aforementioned meeting and bring them to the Solido Design Environment to take designs to new places.
The Solido announcement also comes amid several partnerships and initiatives that Siemens is using to give IC design and verification a very customizable feeling, in a market that already seems crowded with options.
Solido, AI and Chip Design
Siemens has never been shy about making acquisitions to push into new markets or gain new capabilities. For me, the biggest and earlier impact of this was the acquisition of NX in 2007, but electronics engineers might look to 2016 and 2017 and the acquisitions of Mentor Graphics and Solido. The impact of a new company can take a while to really understand, but during the pandemic when revenues were slightly down overall, the electronic design automation (EDA) portion of Siemens was finding double-digit growth.
Now that acquisition has led to the Solido Design Environment, which uses AI to target the best possible avenues for electronics optimization. Instead of running through every possible numerical mixture of variables in a brute-force analysis, the Solido Design Environment optimizes for circuit power, performance and area and performs production-accurate statistical yield analysis. Siemens estimates that this method can be orders of magnitude faster than brute-force Monte Carlo simulations.
Prior to the Design Environment, Solido offered its Characterization Suite, a library characterization tool powered by machine learning. This included the Solido Generator, which used machine learning to produce process, voltage, and temperatures (PVTs).libs a hundred times faster than SPICE analysis.
Siemens Has Been Busy in IC Design and Verification
The Solido Design Environment isn’t the only recent Siemens news in this space. In early July, Siemens announced that its Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) was expanding to let IC development customers use the power of the cloud when working on electronics simulation projects.
This feels like an incredibly lucrative partnership for both sides, as circuits become more complicated and require more computing power to explore every possible option—or at least to figure out which possible options are the most viable and then explore and verify those options deeply.
One of the most interesting parts for me is the creation of Cloud Flight Plans, a kind of quick-start guide for new users that will show best practices for electronics designers using cloud computing.
Other recent announcements focus on the Calibre product line. First is the Calibre nmPlatform’s certification for the Intel 16 process technology. Calibre nmDRC, Calibre YieldEnhancer, Calibre PERC and Calibre nmLVS are all certified to provide 16nm class performance. Siemens is a founding member of Intel Foundry Services’ EDA Alliance, a group that works together on next-generation electronics innovation.
The next announcement is Calibre DesignEnhancer, a new design layout tool intended to move the layout functions of electronics design earlier in the design process. The focus of the tool is finding voltage drop (IR) and electromigration (EM) issues early.
At this release, point three main functions exist for DesignEnhancer. The correct-by-construction modification helps designers figure out the optimized placement for vias in the layout. Power and ground enhancement add parallel runs into the system to lower the risk of ER and IM issues, with some customers reporting a 90 percent drop in complications. And, finally, filler cell insertion lets users find the best positions for decoupling capacitors to be ready for verification. Here again, runtime testing showed that the method could be up to 10 times faster than previous techniques.
How Does It All Tie Together?
Simulation is a constantly evolving field, working to meet the needs of a diverse customer base to answer a diverse set of questions. One set of simulation tools might not solve all the problems that engineers are working on. But we are in an era when simulation tools pop up every time a new problem arises. Companies like Altair, Ansys or Siemens have this fragmentation now, where one simulation segment like structural analysis or electronics design might have a dozen different tools for engineers to choose from.
It’s obvious that someone at Siemens has run the numbers and looked at the strategy to confirm that Solido Design Environment will serve its customers well by bringing in new capabilities. Pulling in additional companies and teams can be a gamble, and it’s not always a sure bet that a product’s look and functions will translate under the new parent company’s control and branding. From a 50,000-foot view, the full scope of Siemens’ resources here seems to have pushed Solido to a new level with enhanced capabilities in this fresh rollout.
