Mentor: Advanced technology is advancing rapidly, and the EDA industry is facing three major opportunities and challenges

On December 10, the 2020 China Integrated Circuit Design Industry Conference was grandly held in Chongqing. Peng Qihuang, Global Senior Vice President and President of Asia Pacific of Mentor, a Siemens Business, delivered a speech entitled "From Mentor EDA to Siemens EDA" at the conference.

Siemens is a company with a value of 82 billion euros. In 2016, Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics for $4.5 billion and merged it into Siemens Digital Industry Software. After the merger, it was called Mentor, a Siemens Business. This acquisition enables Mentor to provide the most comprehensive design tool portfolio from design to manufacturing, including electronic design, electronic interconnection, mechanical simulation and testing solutions, mechanical product engineering, manufacturing engineering, manufacturing execution systems, lifecycle collaboration, cloud application services, etc.

Peng Qihuang said that at present, Google, ZTE, Facebook and others have increased their investment in semiconductors, and cutting-edge system companies are gradually becoming designers and manufacturers of new chip systems. In this context, system companies are the fastest growing customers of Foundry, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.3%. 

Mentor's continuous growth has gradually broadened Siemens' product line and market share. Currently, Mentor's revenue is rising, with CAE and physical design and verification increasing from 17.8% to 19.6%. Siemens' investment in Mentor is also growing. After acquiring Mentor, Siemens acquired EDA companies such as SOLIDO, COMSA, and UltraSoC, and merged their product lines into Mentor, making Mentor's product line more comprehensive.

The development of 5G/AI/Cloud/IoT has extremely high demands for large amounts of data and fast computing, which puts higher demands on chip yield and advanced processes, and the EDA industry is also facing new opportunities and challenges. In this regard, Peng Qihuang summarized three challenges: rapid advancement of advanced processes, rapid improvement of product functions, verification, and digital twins.

Rapid advancement of advanced processes: including tool performance scaling, design for manufacturability, testing and finished product yield, and computational lithography.

From 2013 to 2019, the technology node has developed from 28nm to 7nm (EUV); the chip size has developed from 137mm² to 92mm²; and the number of transistors has developed from more than 1 billion to 8.5 billion. High-order nodes have greatly promoted the demand for EDA, and 7nm has grown to 35% of TSMC's revenue.

Rapid improvement of product functions: such as high-level synthesis HLS, high-performance layout and routing, power consumption optimization and 3D integration.

To this end, Mentor provides Catapult HLS and advanced heterogeneous packaging solutions, among which Catapult HLS greatly reduces the design work of custom accelerators. Through accurate implementation indicators and alternative architecture ratios, Tiny Yolo CNN reasoning speed is 10,000 times faster than software implementation, and each reasoning saves 12,000 times more effort than software implementation.

In the advanced heterogeneous packaging solution, Mentor provides heterogeneous planning and prototyping in the design phase; in the implementation phase, Mentor can provide physical implementation of silicon interposers and packaging; in the verification phase, Mentor provides 2.5/3D advanced logic and physical verification; in the analysis phase, Mentor provides thermal analysis and mechanical analysis for reliability.

Verification and Digital Twins: Includes hardware for application scale performance, integrated simulation engine and co-modeling, analog mixed signal, lifecycle management.

To meet this challenge, Mentor provides PAVE360, a closed-loop cross-system integrated simulation verification solution that covers sensors, software, SoC chips, and electronic control units. In addition, Mentor also provides model-based system engineering.