China’s top semiconductor design software developer Empyrean Technology said it has made breakthroughs in design tools for memory chips and panel displays, as part of its long-term goal to “fully replace foreign products” amid the ongoing US-China tech war.
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For memory chip design, Empyrean added a “clone group” function to the layout editor, which helps “quickly and accurately complete the layout design of identical units” as memory devices contain arrays of storage modules, according to a filing to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange over the weekend.
Its simulation tool for memory chips was powered by artificial intelligence, which enables accurate simulation of high-yield circuits with a “smaller number” of tests, it said.
Both innovations were launched in the first half of the year, when Empyrean also introduced an “intelligent and automated” platform for panel display design, used to control the pixel layout on a flat screen. The new system, which uses AI algorithms to replace human work, is being rolled out to major panel manufacturers in China “on a large scale”, the company said.
The progress provides fresh evidence of how China is slowly moving towards self-sufficiency in critical areas such as electronic design automation (EDA) for chip design and operating systems. Huawei Technologies is set to open-source its software toolkit used to develop applications on its Ascend AI processors as it tries to compete with Nvidia’s proprietary Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, toolkit.
Beijing-based Empyrean also launched six other new software tools to facilitate the design of digital circuits, analogue circuits and three-dimensional integrated circuits.