A team of engineers, AI specialists and chip design researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has designed, built and tested what they are describing as the first AI-based chip design system. The group has published a paper describing their system, called QiMeng, on the arXiv preprint server.
Over the past several decades, integrated circuit makers have developed systems for developing processor chips for computers, smartphones and other electronic devices. Such systems tend to be made up of large teams of highly skilled people who can take design ideas (such as faster computing or running AI apps) and turn them into physical designs that can be fabricated in specially designed factories. The process is notoriously slow and expensive.
More recently, computer and device makers have been looking for ways to speed up the process and to allow for more flexibility—some may want a chip that can do just one thing, for example, but do it really well. In this new study, the team in China has applied AI to the problem.
The work involved using an LLM to take user requests regarding performance standards and turn them into architectural plans for a processor chip that would meet the specifications and also create the software that runs on it.
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