Synopsys’ Ravi Subramaniam on Virtualization of Chip Design

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Last week, Synopsys used its user group conference, SNUG 2024, to announce a collaboration with Nvidia to integrate Synopsys’ electronics digital twin solutions with the Nvidia Omniverse platform to reduce design time while ensuring safety in areas like software-defined vehicles.

EE Times previously talked to CEO Sassine Ghazi on some of the announcements from the event. We also managed to catch Ravi Subramaniam, general manager of the systems design group at Synopsys, to explain more about the virtualization of chip design, the changing nature of customers (e.g. Tesla), and how Synopsys tools—coupled with the acquisition of PikeTec last year and now Ansys—builds out the company’s ability to deliver the tools needed to deal with the interplay of hardware and software co-design for complex devices.

Subramaniam, who joined Synopsys from Siemens Digital Industries in 2022 to manage the systems group, said, “There are tectonic changes in systems development. As more and more software comes into a product, there’s an opportunity to develop new business models, and there’s a lot of excitement about that—but also, there’s [the question] what does it do to product development, and a lot of the traditional elements really start breaking where you have the model, I’ll build hardware, write the software and then test the product. So, the development cycle changes from one that’s sequential, to one that’s more continuous integration of traditional development, but also introducing virtualization to do things earlier and earlier.”

The automotive industry is seen as a key industry to benefit from this, he explains. For example, automotive design teams are building and validating their products in the digital world before manufacturing them in the real world. Synopsys announced a collaboration with Nvidia in which Synopsys’ systems software, virtual ECU and electronics digital twin fabric will be connected with Omniverse—a development platform for building interoperable 3D applications for industrial workloads.

Synopsys’ virtual prototyping solutions provide automotive engineering teams with a digital twin of the electronic system of the car to enable the development, testing and validation of the car’s software and electronic systems. Omniverse delivers physically-based visualization and simulation of environmental factors.

These capabilities together provide engineering teams with a digital twin of both the vehicle electronics and the environment, allowing them to test and validate embedded software, safety, and autonomy features well ahead of production. Synopsys expects to begin engaging with lead customers on the solution in the second half of 2024, with general availability expected in 2025.