AI, Chiplet EDA demand is strong! Domestic EDA enters quickly, breaking through

"Looking at the global development of the EDA industry, mergers and acquisitions are an important means of industrial development. The top three global EDA companies undergo mergers and acquisitions several times a year, possessing a relatively complete full-process product line, and have significant advantages in certain areas. Domestic EDA companies have grown rapidly in the past five years. In 2019, the market share of domestic EDA was 1%, and by 2023, the market share of domestic EDA reached 3%. Hua Da Jiu Tian is the only domestic EDA company that has entered the top ten globally, with a full-process in specific areas and leading technology in certain fields." On August 16, at the EDA sub-forum of the 2024 China (Shenzhen) Integrated Circuit Summit, Hua Da Jiu Tian's Deputy General Manager Guo Jiwang stated this to the journalists and integrated circuit industry engineers present.

Currently, the number of domestic EDA companies has reached more than 120, and there are over 60 photoresist companies. In the past few years, with the support of capital, domestic EDA companies have expanded indiscriminately, and the industry's development has also led to the phenomenon of involution.

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What is the current state of domestic EDA? In 2024, under the trend of AI and Chiplet technologies, which product lines are domestic EDA companies focusing on? This article conducts a detailed analysis by combining the viewpoints of executives from Hua Da Jiu Tian, Guo Lun Electronics, Xin He Semiconductor, and Si Er Xin, as well as the progress of new EDA tools.

Current state of domestic EDA: The industry is growing rapidly, with the three main EDA companies exerting effort, but there is a lack of foundation and system capabilities.

EDA is at the forefront of the semiconductor industry chain, with a value accounting for nearly 2% of the global semiconductor market, and has a significant leverage effect, capable of driving the development of a semiconductor industry chain with a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars. EDA and photolithography machines support the development of the entire semiconductor industry chain.

Data from the China Semiconductor Industry Association shows that in 2022, the market size of China's EDA industry reached 11.56 billion yuan, with a growth rate as high as 11.80%, exceeding the development speed of the global industry. Guo Jiwang emphasized that the Chinese semiconductor market is the largest in the world, and the development of the industry has brought tremendous market potential. The trend of domestic substitution has driven the development of EDA companies.

"Everyone is quite familiar with the current state of domestic EDA, which is very competitive, with more than 120 EDA companies. The three giants in the EDA industry hold more than 75% of the global market share. These giants have built complete industrial ecological chains through many years of development and continuous mergers and acquisitions, forming very high barriers. Many IC design manufacturers face pressure to bring products to market, and are more inclined to use more mature EDA tools that have been verified many times. Chip design manufacturers are not very proactive in using domestic EDA software, and there is not enough understanding and recognition of domestic EDA software." Hua Da Jiu Tian's Deputy General Manager Guo Jiwang said.

Xin He Semiconductor's Product Application Director Su Zhouxiang believes that the current global EDA market size is about 12 billion US dollars, and the domestic EDA market size is about more than 10 billion RMB, with domestic EDA companies holding less than 20% of the market share in the local market. Both the global EDA market and the domestic EDA market are highly monopolized by European and American EDA giants.

Guo Jiwang pointed out that domestic EDA companies are continuously completing the product chain, with some point tools reaching an internationally advanced level, but there is still no full industry chain support capability, no advanced process support capability, and there are deficiencies in the foundation and standards. In terms of talent reserves, Hua Da Jiu Tian has more than 600 R&D personnel, but there is still a significant gap with foreign countries, especially a shortage of high-end talent. In addition, although EDA has received attention from social capital, there is a significant lack of R&D investment, and there is a certain gap compared with European and American peers.

Yang Lianfeng, Director and President of Guo Lun Electronics, recently stated that EDA has a relatively high product threshold, characterized by a large variety, long chain, and long R&D cycle. There is a significant overall gap in the technical level of the industry between domestic and foreign companies, which has also become one of the key "bottleneck" industries restricting the development of China's semiconductor industry. He emphasized that it is precisely because of the huge gap with foreign countries that domestic EDA companies continue to invest in R&D, improve product technology levels, complete product chains, and meet the needs of the domestic semiconductor industry."The background of EDA localization is mainly driven by two major factors: First, the domestic semiconductor advanced process is being strangled, and European and American technologies are highly monopolized, but they are approaching the physical limit and have entered the post-Moore era. Second, advanced packaging, heterogeneous integration, and Chiplet technology have become the best technical directions to break through the blockade," said Su Zhouxiang, Director of Semiconductor Product Application.

AI + EDA and Chiplet EDA breakthroughs offer great opportunities for domestic manufacturers.

Guoji Wang, Deputy General Manager of HuaDa JiuTian, said that HuaDa JiuTian is currently focusing on six major EDA development areas, including artificial intelligence and EDA, Chiplet EDA, information security EDA, digital twin and EDA, and IP. In the field of artificial intelligence EDA, HuaDa JiuTian mainly focuses on the special needs of EDA to support the design of artificial intelligence chips, software and hardware collaborative heterogeneous efficient simulation solutions, and AI+EDA.

As early as 2018, HuaDa JiuTian launched Empyrean ALPS-GT, which is the industry's first GPU-accelerated SPICE simulator. Based on a high-computing heterogeneous platform and the unique heterogeneous intelligent matrix solution technology SMS-GT, it greatly improved the performance of circuit simulation while maintaining 100% True SPICE accuracy, with performance increased by more than 10 times compared to CPU architecture SPICE. At the Design Automation Conference (DAC) held in San Francisco, USA in June this year, NVIDIA demonstrated the powerful capabilities of Empyrean ALPS-GT at HuaDa JiuTian's booth and showed how Empyrean ALPS-GT can shorten the runtime from 20 days (using traditional CPU simulators) to just 2 hours without sacrificing accuracy.

In the field of Chiplet EDA, HuaDa JiuTian provides a full process solution for design verification that supports the design verification of Chiplet substrates. In terms of advanced packaging, HuaDa JiuTian's automatic routing tool Empyrean Storm supports the industry's mainstream advanced packaging silicon-based processes and organic RDL processes, supports large-scale interconnection routing between multiple chips, supports high-density escape routing, and large-area power and ground plane routing. At the same time, Empyrean Storm has basic packaging layout design and editing functions that can be seamlessly integrated with Empyrean Argus.

XinHe Semiconductor was established in 2010, released its first flagship EDA software IRIS in 2011, and launched a high-speed EDA product line. In 2021, through forward-looking strategic planning and layout, it was the first in the world to release a 3DIC Chiplet system design analysis full-process EDA platform. Dai Wenliang, co-founder and senior vice president of XinHe Semiconductor, once said to the media that the development of artificial intelligence requires more and more computing power, and the integration of high-energy-efficiency computing chips and Chiplet integration technology has become an important direction for breaking through the bottleneck of advanced processes and improving computing power in the post-Moore era.

It is reported that XinHe Semiconductor's 3DIC Chiplet is a complete solution for Chiplet, including 3DIC design, SI/PI/multi-physical field analysis. The platform has AI-driven meshing technology, cloud computing loading distributed parallel computing capabilities, and also supports the joint simulation engine technology of bare chips, interlayers, and substrates.

In 2023, XinHe released two flagship products - the 3DIC Chiplet full-process design platform and the packaging and PCB one-stop design platform have won many awards. XinHe Semiconductor uses differentiated simulation engine technology, AI intelligent meshing fusion technology, and HPC high-performance distributed computing technology to form a full-process EDA platform for semiconductor design analysis from chips, Chiplets, packaging to PCB; it has released more than 20 EDA tools across 12 major application solutions, serving seven major terminal industries such as smart terminals, communication base stations, data centers, the Internet of Things, automotive electronics, new energy, and industrial equipment.

SiErXin was established in 2004 and is the first domestic digital EDA supplier. The company's business has covered tools and services such as architectural design, software simulation, hardware simulation, prototype verification, digital debugging, and EDA cloud.

Chen Yingren, vice president of SiErXin, said: "The emergence of generative AI has led to an explosion of related applications, bringing new opportunities to the entire chip design industry. The engine of the AI accelerator is not a traditional architecture, and a new design process is needed to achieve application-driven algorithms, and then the algorithms drive the software, and finally the software defines the overall hardware architecture. All of these require new exploration, which is where EDA can make a difference." At the AMD ACS Summit in July this year, Chen Yingren pointed out that SiErXin, centered on the "Precision Chip Strategy," injects strong momentum into current chip development through "heterogeneous verification" and "parallel-driven left-shift cycle."It is reported that the latest eighth-generation prototyping technology launched by S2C is based on the adaptive SoC released by AMD, with a large-scale design. S2C has laid out comprehensive solutions in the digital EDA field, including the "Xinshenjiang" architecture design, "Xinshenchi" software simulation, "Xinshen Ding" hardware simulation, and the leading domestic "Xinshen Tong" prototyping tool, emphasizing the importance of EDA cloud support.

In conclusion, in recent years, under the wave of generative AI technology accelerating the transformation of various industries, EDA design tools have also ushered in a period of rapid development and change. Domestic EDA companies have already achieved breakthroughs in the field of point tools. How to form a breakthrough in the base capability within the new industrial cycle still requires more R&D investment and systematic capabilities.

At present, the mergers and acquisitions of local EDA companies have gradually formed a trend. Through mergers and integrations, companies can achieve concentration of resources, talents, and capital, thereby truly achieving breakthroughs from points to surfaces. We look forward to seeing Chinese local EDA companies grow into globally competitive EDA enterprises in the process of strengthening their own R&D capabilities and mergers and reorganizations.