One of the challenges faced by the Chinese chip design industry is the lack of advanced domestic electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Market leaders Cadence and Synopsys are unable to supply the chipmaking software to Chinese entities due to U.S. export controls. Also, until recently, no EDA tools for chip design software could work on China's domestically produced CPUs. Things are starting to change, and a Chinese firm, Xinhuazhang, introduced its first EDA software that can work on China's domestically produced processors.
At the Kunpeng Developer Day on April 25, 2024, Xinhuazhang delivered a keynote speech on its progress in developing a domestic EDA platform that can use Huawei's Kunpeng processors (powered by the Armv8 instruction set architecture) for servers and Phytium's FeiTeng processors (which use SPARCv9-derived ISA) for supercomputers. This is a significant development for China's semiconductor industry as domestic chip designers can now design devices and simulate them using solely domestic software and hardware.
