This week, Google unveiled its AlphaChip reinforcement learning method for designing chip layouts. The AlphaChip AI promises to substantially speed up the design of chip floorplans and make them more optimal in terms of performance, power, and area. The reinforcement learning method, now shared with the public, has been instrumental in designing Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and has been adopted by other companies, including MediaTek.
Chip design layout, or floorplan, has traditionally been the longest and most labor-intensive phase of chip development. In recent years, Synopsys has developed AI-assisted chip design tools that can accelerate development and optimize a chip's floorplan. However, these tools are pretty costly. Google wants to democratize this AI-assisted chip design approach somewhat.
