Siemens is to buy Solido Design Automation to add machine learning to its range of chip design tools.
The machine learning-based products developed by Solido of Canada are currently used in production at over 40 major companies, enabling them to design, verify, and manufacture more competitive products than ever before.
Solido will be added to Mentor Graphic's analogue and mixed-signal (AMS) verification portfolio to help customers address the growing challenges of IC design and verification for automotive, communications, data-centre computing, networking, mobile, and IoT applications. The terms of the transaction are not disclosed.
"With the acquisition of Mentor we made a large commitment to EDA," said Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens PLM Software. "This new acquisition of Solido strengthens that presence and demonstrates our commitment to serving our customers in the IC industry."
"Solido has become an invaluable partner helping our customers address the impact of variability to improve IC performance, power, area, and yield," said Amit Gupta, founder, president and CEO of Solido Design Automation. "Combining our technology portfolio with Mentor's outstanding IC capabilities and market reach will allow us to provide world-class solutions to the semiconductor industry on an even larger scale. We are also excited to contribute to Siemens' broader digitalisation strategy with our applied machine learning for engineering technology portfolio and expertise."
Variation-aware design and characterisation has become fundamental in developing modern semiconductor products with the best possible power, performance, and cost. Using analogue, mixed-signal, memory, and standard cell circuits means the verification software needs to deliver very high confidence in the simulation results while avoiding time- and resource-intensive analysis methods. Solido's proprietary machine learning algorithms significantly reduce the time and resources needed for the verification and provide improved data visualisation.