Cadence CEO Drives Growth Beyond Chip Design With AI And Computational Software – Forbes
Dr. Anirudh Devgan – President And CEO – Cadence Design Systems
Artificial Intelligence has been all the buzz lately, and the technology now goes hand-in-hand with the complex modeling simulations that are required for efficient semiconductor chip design. Computer simulations and computational software are critical for chip design, and the industry has been harnessing the power of these digital twins of chips for decades, as complexity has scaled to hundreds of billions of transistors and perhaps trillions of transistors in the not-so distant future. In fact, the reality of trillion transistor chips is something that Dr. Anirudh Devgan of Cadence Design Systems feels is attainable by the year 2030, though he and his company have a vision of bringing the power of simulation, modeling and computational software to far more than just semiconductor chip design.
Cadence Headquarters San Jose, CA
Dr. Devgan is a computer scientist and IEEE Fellow, who currently serves as President and CEO of Cadence Design Systems. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities in the field of electronic design automation (EDA) and this year, Devgan was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. Under Devgan’s leadership, Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ:CNDS) expanded its portfolio of EDA tools, systems and computational software to incorporate AI, computational fluid dynamics and bio-simulation, while achieving several years of record growth with 40% margins. In fact, this week marked an all-time valuation high for the company (NASDAQ: CDNS), at over $58 billion.
My technology analyst partner, Marco Chiappetta and I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Devgan and pick his brain a bit on his company vision and how this new breed of emerging computational software will impact the tech ecosystem and everyday life. When it comes to AI, Devgan feels it will be instrumental for efficiency in many ways, noting “major benefits we see include a) productivity, with up to 10X improvement for highly complex electronics design flows, b) skills augmentation, because AI can enable less experienced engineers to produce high quality products in less time, c) power savings, because AI has proven very effective in squeezing the most efficiency out of designs and impacting sustainability… AI is great for finding niche optimization of product performance, including speed and response time, which can be critical differentiators.”
So that’s Devgan’s view on the role of AI, but what about simulation, modeling and digital twins? We asked how Cadence fits with current platforms like NVIDIA’s Omniverse and Anirudh shared that, “A major computational software application focus for us is system modeling and simulation. There’s a chips-to-chillers synergy in the area of thermal analysis, for example, and adjacencies into other areas of physics analysis. Integration with the right compute platforms is key to scaling analysis to full system scope. We offer a digital twinning solution for data center thermal analysis that runs in the NVIDIA Omniverse.
Also, we started working on accelerating our solutions using GPU compute engines such as those from NVIDIA. Jensen recently highlighted our computational fluid dynamics (CFD) collaboration in his keynote at GTC. We’ve also applied our expertise to novel distributed computing approaches that deliver 10X performance over alternatives.”
Finally, those who have been following Cadence may have heard about its recent acquisition of OpenEye, a scientific molecular modeling software company that delivers powerful modeling solutions to advance drug and antibody discovery for research, among other critical health sciences. But does an EDA chip design company actually have synergy with biomolecular modeling? It sounds like a proverbial moonshot, though Dr. Devgan offered, “Computational Software underlies everything we do. So expanding into system simulation was a natural adjacency for our end customers, as well as leveraging the 40 years of computational software expertise. Bio-simulation is not an adjacency today, but it does leverage our computational software expertise. We rely on, and will learn from our OpenEye colleagues about the market differences, but we can immediately collaborate on core technology that can differentiate and improve our overall engineering efficiency.”
In short, it can be said that that math isn’t all that different than when simulating for chips or aero and fluid dynamics.
McClaren Formula 1 Car – Cadence – Official Technology Partner
Cadence recently announced a multi-year partnership with the McLaren Racing Formula 1 Team. As an official partner of McLaren, the Formula 1 team will have full access to Cadence’s Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software and aerodynamic prediction tools that are critical for shaving seconds off race times, for faster, more efficient F1 car designs. So, from semiconductor EDA, to thermal, fluid and aerodynamics, and even biomolecular modeling for drug research, Cadence is bringing its computational software and AI strengths to virtually any market sector or discipline that may benefit it seems, because again, the computational and mathematical requirements are often similar. What’s next for Devgan and Cadence? It seems like the sky is the limit.
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