New DESY Spin-off Aims to Speed Up Chip Design
“ximul.it” is developing a method to speed up circuit simulation of new chip designs tenfold and offers this as a cloud-based service
Besides being a very complex high-tech product, semiconductor chips are a key technology and essential for digitalization. The SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) analogue circuit simulation is fundamental for electronic design automation and is used in all chip designs. Simulator runtimes usually range from days but larger projects can stretch into months, constituting a true bottleneck in the design process. Hence, they are very expensive and energy intensive. “ximul.it”, the latest start-up by Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, is offering a cloud-based service that speeds up the necessary simulation process by a factor of ten. This way, three weeks of simulation can be reduced to two days on average.
Efficiency and Cost Savings in Chip-Design
“ximul.it” offers its clients the advantage of using an order of magnitude faster and more energy-efficient SPICE simulation with reduced costs. The benefits for the semiconductor industry are improved quality and faster time-to-market processes in a highly competitive global industry. “ximul.it” uses hardware acceleration on Domain Specific Architectures (DSA) as a technology approach. Whereas industry standard circuit simulators are mostly software running on general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) with graphic processing unit (GPU) acceleration appearing recently; the “ximul.it” engine runs on hardware entirely, thereby getting rid of all the overhead and bottlenecks associated with complex software stacks running on von Neumann machines, the architecture currently used in general-purpose computers. The “ximul.it” pure-hardware-approach to SPICE is worldwide unique.
Beyond speed, “ximul.it” contributes to energy-efficient computation in data centers, whose electricity demands for servers and cooling are already in the single-digit percentage scale on the global electrical bill and increasing steadily. The hardware-based approach is much more energy efficient than running software on general-purpose processors. That is why “ximul.it” has been accepted into the New Computing Concepts Challenge by SPRIND, the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (Agentur für Sprunginnovationen).
The founding team of “ximul.it” has over 60 years of combined experience in algorithms, software, and hardware designs. Sergei Fridman, a firmware developer of high-speed image data re-assembly acceleration, and Ofir Shefer Shalev, an FPGA and embedded software engineer, are colleagues at DESY. Both worked previously at Intel together. After Ofir Shefer Shalev started at DESY, he recruited his former colleague to work in science as well. Now, together with Oliver Hauck, a specialist in circuit design as well as embedded hard- and firmware designs, they developed the new approach for FPGA-based SPICE simulation. Hauck will be acting as the CEO of ximul.it. As a long-time freelancer he will bring his experience in business development and client relations to the new company. Fridman will act as the COO and Shefer Shalev as CTO and CFO in a combined role.
The “ximul.it” team achieved their solution using a multi-FPGA (field-programmable gate array) based platform paired with a specifically developed algorithm. This allows for parallelism in spatial computation, while at the same time being up to 30 times more energy efficient than conventional solutions which are based on CPUs (central processing unit) and GPUs (graphics processing unit).
The “ximul.it” team started its first business proceedings in early 2023, and is located on the DESY Campus in the Start-up Labs Bahrenfeld. The founders have been advised by the DESY Start-up Office and are currently receiving funding from SPRIND.
More information about ximull.it and its services can be found at: www.ximul.it
published
- 2023/07/03
Press Contact
- innovation@desy.de