The Software Behind Silicon (with Synopsys Founder Aart de Geus and CEO Sassine Ghazi)

0:00Hello acquired listeners today is a very special treat our guests are the founding CEO of synopsis art de Gias and the CEO today Ceciene gazi synopsis is the 80 billion dollar company that makes the software that chip designers rely on to do their jobs It is one of the two big players along with cadence design systems the field is called electronic design automation or EDA It's a crude analogy, but you can think about it as the productivity software for chip designers Like the Microsoft Excel or Figma for that profession and so much of the complexity of chip design these days has been baked into the EDA software That it makes entirely new types of chips possible that you couldn't do without them They are the essential infrastructure behind the AI era and all the semiconductor innovation that we are experiencing today No AI applications would be possible without EDA and the incredible optimizations that the software does for chip designers And in fact in a full circle moments synopsis even uses AI now to design the software to design chips So with that on to the interview with art and Ceciene Art and Ceciene welcome to ACQ to thank you for having us We wanted to do a deep dive for listeners It's been a while since we were in the land of semiconductors We've covered Nvidia and TSMC and Apple and ARM so many of your Customers and companies that you work with but we have never hit the world of EDA directly and so listeners Art de Gias is one of the storied pioneers of the semiconductor industry 37 years ago founded the company and really evolved to become an essential part with synopsis of the semiconductor value chain and whole ecosystem today And recently Ceciene you Transition and took the helm going from COO to CEO so we have the unbelievable privilege of having both of you with us here today Pleasure to be here.

1:56Yes. Thank you. All right, so this is acquired and we love history So I think to ground the Current state of the semiconductor ecosystem Why don't we wind it back to the beginning of synopsis? So what did the lay of the land look like then and how crazy was the idea for what would become EDA when you Refer's getting started well So what we're talking about here is mid 80s right and so just to put I guess a little stake in the ground I was a general electric designing at about four micron I know you don't remember that that existed but yeah, they were this big That also says that general electric was actually in semiconductors at some point time They invested in sort of the factory of the future this was the future sort of the same as AI is now everybody needs to have it Well, then it was semiconductors things went pretty well until they didn't go so well and then go so well meant in hindsight That in 1985 was the worst downturn in the history of semiconductors in the 80s and 90s and I think it hits general Electric hard because that was a very large company.

3:04They had a very steady state sort of dividend driven investor group And so these ups and down in the semiconductor industry turned out to not be really their thing Long story short, we're gonna be laid off and so it was completely accidental There was also accidental that in the the five years roughly that I've worked there and especially last three We had developed a number of design tools that actually were very innovative one of those was synthesis We were somewhat known because of that and while on one hand I literally actually interviewed for a job We're gonna be laid off after all Simultaneously we had this rebellious idea of you know, what if we took the technology and looked if we could start Do we start up and we did it with I think great care of thinking because We decided very quickly.

3:57We're gonna do that in full light of general electric meaning tell them about it And not take anything it was a great company. They had taken very good care of us and actually it was just the right thing to do And there was an opportunity to Advocate this spin out with the technology which always going to be lost They were going to get out of of this field with a small group of total people of seven We essentially got out of G with their support both some financial support and The transactional the technology for what the equivalent of a million dollars of value and fast forwarding by time when public G Apocoted 23 million.

4:39I'm still proud of that because they really deserved it It was the right outcome, but it was all pretty accidental how that came about Wow, it's so rare the a corporate spin out into a you know venture style venture goes well That's amazing. Actually were you all designing microprocessors or was this more specialized? No, this this was so called gate arrays and these were essentially chips for other customers It's hard to remember a gate rate that the gateway was essentially a long series of transistors that have been prefabricated They were sitting in rows You use the first layer of metal to essentially take those transistors and make certain gates out of it The man gate and or gate and inverter that was pretty much the choice set And then you use the rest of the layers to connect those to actually create the actual circuit G would do that for their customers and then manufacture these chips and Gatoray that's the GA in FPGA, right?

5:42Yes. Yeah, I think so actually yeah because it's same content Yes, it is exactly the same concept. Yes. I never heard a question Well, it's funny you said Gatoray is oh, I haven't thought about that in a long time, but FPGA is like that's the current hotness You're absolutely right. Well, yes, so we're hot already then I guess So this idea that you had that you could turn it into its own company Was there a blueprint that already existed for chip designers need great software to do their jobs well or was that sort of a novel idea that that could be an independent company? Well, you really have two questions at the same time here Why did we get into synthesis in the first place?

6:20There's a technical question and then oh how to get to a company It's sort of funky how we got there because while I was there was a guy a GE who had Explained in some seminar that if you used Multi -plexers you could actually create circuits that would be denser than just and or inverte or nan or in inverte And so I talked to one of my designer friends say can you put together the footprints that you need to do a Multi -plexer and he did and put that in the library and then we'll design with those and it gets smaller circuits The problem is none of the designers knew how to use them and So after some reflection, you thought you know Why don't we just automatically design that and somehow we managed to write a program called Socrates that actually did that and Got quite good results Although it turned out in a long term that multiplexers were not a good idea because Multiplexers are not restoring logic meaning you put three in a row your signal degrades Whereas with all the others, you know, the signal stays a very square wave, which is what you want it But in the process we became quickly known through some paper published as being on the frontier of this thing called synthesis and of course By that time we discovered that IBM had that worked on it for a long time and so did Fujitsu and Toshiba and a whole bunch of large companies But at the same time we knew we had something because the results were astoundingly good compared to What was the manual design done before and within GE they used it on the gate arrays with great results And then the whole notion of well now suddenly we're gonna be laid off and all of that is gone Gradually morphed into talking to some VCs talking to some designers and say well, what about creating a company?

8:07You have to understand at that point in time I was a very young person and I had a bunch of way younger people Because six out of the seven had all been summer students that sort of the cast of characters and the notion of writing a business plan was Interesting concept and I still have a couple of the books that I bought in the local bonds and noble of how to write a business plan You like Jensen did the same thing when he had to write a business plan for Nvidia Well, although he was already closer to the business side when he worked at LSI logic same concept fundamentally The one thing I just couldn't figure out was What is the difference between orders?

8:47Revenue and sales And to this day I don't quite understand the difference you can say I'm revenue in orders But you know for that we have people now as they say hey You invent a great product and those things will figure themselves out deferred revenue bookings buildings One thing I want to understand quickly before we get to the company before Synthesis and software how was chip design done was floor planning done like architects like with drafting boards? Was it pen and paper? Oh, you're right with so many of those pieces But the first thing to understand is there's fundamentally two layers.

9:23There's a functional layer and then's the physical layer When you talk about the layout You already have an understanding of what the function is and what the buildings blocks are Now you actually have to physically design them and physically connect them right We were working at the functional level and and there the notion is you have some complicated mass function a digital mass function that you want to implement and You need to choose the right gates and there's a number of methods simplify that but ultimately You build a set of building blocks that you then connect You typically did it on paper or then gradually on a schematics entry type thing and then comes the question Well, how good is it?

10:06Well fewer gates is better You know area was not really used the substitute at that point time was just a number of gates Because if you knew that the rest was sort of determined and then the other thing that was important and that will turn out to be Absolutely crucial on how we differentiate it is we understood that the speed was key and the speed is determined by whatever is the longest path through your design and So we could judge if the circuit was getting better not only was it getting smaller but also was it getting faster and That combination turned out to be the key differentiator fascinating So Cecien we have not yet gotten to your role in the story and so I want to start from sort of your beginning with synopsis You joined the company in 1998 But I'm sure that in your jobs at Intel and elsewhere you sort of came across synopsis before so do you remember your first experience?

11:00Yeah, I mean as art is describing to you the synthesis the gates the function then the place and route So my first experience with synopsis I was doing my Masters in electrical engineering Actually, I was more on the control system side so I did not touch synopsis at all After I finished my master's degree I realized that's not the field I want to be in because most of the job opportunities at the time were controlling massive mechanical stuff be it oil diggers or a giant satellite or what have you then I started my PhD in VLSI design and this is where synopsis my first introduction to synthesis and as you're describing it art how do you build the library the building block you synthesize Back to your question David the largest design at the time that a single engineer could do was very limited by the number of gates Because the actual software from a capacity point of view could not manage Just the clock time to run and synthesize will limit how much can you design in terms of size of design?

12:15Wait, so the physical on ship limitations were actually not the bottleneck It was the ability for the design software to handle the complexity It's both right because first you need the how much the software can handle the complexity and Still meet your performance target and artist right at that time performance target was the key Power area was so secondary which 10 years later it became performance power then kind of area now you optimize To the end all at the same time in order to make your requirement When I started my career at Intel Believe it or not a lot of the stuff that the synthesis creates they were Manually verified so you lay out the transistors You make sure you have the right width right length and how you connect them together to create the actual cells So my experience with synopsis was grad school then of course at Intel I used many of the synopsis products and that's when the opportunity to join synopsis came along I was super familiar with the company and the support the product R &D and the rest of history And so you joined because we were the only company had no bugs, right?

13:30Is that right?

13:35Exactly Doing this synthesis class of problem. This is really really hard to do, right? And what made it particularly hard was there were of course techniques to optimize just the functionality and Many of those were algorithmic we added to that what we then called an expert system which was Look at certain situation the circumcise this doesn't look good, but I know here's a better version and so you would add So -called rules to make it better and you add a rule gets better Yeah, it's five rules it gets better yet one more rule gets worse because now you need a rule to manage the rules I always like to highlight that it wasn't expert system because that makes us say now kings of AI You know 30 years later, but the fact is it was limited in its capability But it was dramatically better than humans and so by the time and this was not even the first product It was a prototype of the first product that we had as the military became a company we talked to customers and They would give us one of their circuits that had maybe a max a couple hundred gates They had worked on it for many many many weeks and then a matter of few hours We could literally give it back to them 30 % smaller and smaller meant 30 % fewer gates and 30 % faster meaning shorter critical path They would look at it and then it's a it's impossible There's no way you did that and then it would go away literally for two weeks and then they would come back and say Well, I have checked and I checked it's actually doing it and then the expectations of course are immediately way higher than what we could do Because they had just encountered magic right out of that interaction Something very profound happened is for the majority they became our friends customers Because they could me say yeah, but you know what you did here.

15:30That's not that great and By being able to look at our circuit and saying that's not that great. It made them great But they gave us a gift of feedback that two weeks later we had fixed based on their input and therefore they become you know a parents of the tool to right everybody had added something And that whole first generation of two dozen three dozen companies over time they all had the same behavior Which is they root it for us because they they could see it happening on their own circuits It doesn't matter what kind of circuit you're making whether it's a microprocessor or an analog system or a gate array like you need this Technology you need this optimization and so Intel's happy that you know you were getting better even though that's also serving Ti Multiple boxes here for starters.

16:24We were strictly a digital company Well today we do a variety of things on analog circuits automatically But that was far away plus you know This was a cornerstone to really the digital age and Before synopsis and in all fairness I should say before synthesis and before placing routes the two go hand in hand The field was called computer aided design you did stuff on the computer but computer essentially helped you do stuff that you did yourself What was so great about synthesis it actually created something and so we were part of the transformation of computer aided design to electronic design Automation I remember you know we had a moniker for that is you know with the only ones that have license to kill You know one of a double O several because license to kill means we can actually change a circuit and that was completely taboo Before if a tool did that means Put some bugs in it right Right, you wouldn't want software intervening in your own workflow the creativity was reserved for the human for the designer You know, please only aid me do not automate for me.

17:33Well, it was more than creativity It was the trust that it actually would work People really could not trust the tools will change it for the better Yeah, and you know, it's amazing even in 2018 when we introduced AI For the synthesis and place and route believe it or not the resistance from our users Was I want to know what the AI change will like but that's the idea you cannot is just how many parameters do you want to understand? And there was a lack of trust for about the first two years even though the outcome the results were always better Using the AI system They meaning the users could not Trust it or use it because they want to answer the question, you know engineers But I need to understand what did it do?

18:22Of course, right now is a different story AI is so well accepted that question is gone What I love about what's the scene just said is We are essentially a company that has repeated its own history over and over again And I was almost tempted to say that you know, we learned it all from Ronald Reagan trust, but verify Yeah Here's this AI stuff and then you still need to simulate a lot to make them sure that you didn't have an error in it But the value of trust is extremely high But the necessity for verification is also on the site right because the cost of going to Manufacturing of something that has a bug is whoa you made a big decision there and Often I don't trust AI tools because when I do Look at the output.

19:09I'm like, it's not clear to me that this is better than me doing it and There are many situations where it is and anywhere isn't do you feel like EDA is uniquely well suited toward a Designer just letting go and saying I trust the machine and I don't have to understand every little input Maybe what you're referring to Ben is Generative AI when it's generating something through a natural language and you say, uh This is 90 % accurate not a hundred percent accurate. I'm assuming that's what you're referring to In the EDA world We're all about Optimization Massive optimization problems. I mean we're talking about many billions of Transistors that you're jamming in a small silicon area and you're trying to optimize Where do you place it?

20:02How do you route it to how do you get to the performance the power and you know This is no way for a human to do it. So so our industry has been very much in the space Of using technology to optimize So what we do for AI we we're doing generative AI but put that aside for a moment is Using machine learning and AI algorithm to optimize for an outcome But you always have as art mentioned many steps Before you committed to manufacturing and say it's gonna work meaning you don't just say Oh, that's what synthesis or AI generated is gonna work. I'll go to whomever your foundry and you spend many many many millions and the chip does not work So you have many checks of verification What we have pioneered with AI for EDA starting in 2017 Right now is used by dozens of customers in production meaning they're trusting it They're trusting the outcome But there are all the other checks You have to go through to verify that it's gonna work once you manufacture it And to be clear there's basically specific goals around Size around power efficiency and around you know overall performance And it's basically optimizing within that set of constraints So you can sort of prove when it's done that it's it's better than what happened before the AI to came in Those are the outcome metrics right and you just mentioned should three or four and that's what we optimize for But you know what that forgets It's not only that there's the other 10 trillion constraints that you have to meet That tolerate zero error and you know the very big difference between many of the AI optimization things that we see in the world And and somehow hallucinate more than others.

21:56There are many very good ones Is that we have a constraint that is much much harsher Which is absolute correctness and functionality And by the way, it's the scene jumped quickly 25 years and in those 25 years there's been 25 years of revolutionary techniques and enhancements not only to what we do but to the circuits That we do with our customers and you know Sitting on an exponential or rate of change that is a large revolutionary changes and every single one every single one has been delivered in an evolutionary way With other words you forget one lesson learned in yeah, I don't know 1997 crosswall capacitance You forget that nothing works today nothing Well, he made it sound so simple.

22:47Yeah, you know we now AI the heck out of it We do but that AI itself works on unbelievable number of parameters and The rules specifically for the layouts have have no tolerance for error You violate one of those the yield will go zip down the drain But see that's why when the question often comes up Why aren't there EDA startups why is the market consolidated to just two It's that exact point that are just made the learning is not just hey can I Train a model and then create an output and it's I'm there the cumulative knowledge To get to the current state before you look at the future state is massive It strikes me that there's actually a lot of parallels to the foundry business just on the software side, you know You can't just go recreate TSMC obviously as we are seeing It's all those cumulative years of learning about how to do this and this is the same thing in the software You know, it's interesting because TSMC was founded three months after synopsis That's in hindsight super interesting because that was simultaneously a change in the industry Where the focus was going to go towards fabulous design And then foundry is that we do the manufacturing and remember before that time, you know many companies were IDMs They have their own foundry and the real men have fabs.

24:20I think was the quote today. We wouldn't dare say it like that Rightfully so, but it was a very macho attitude Still to this day people that spend a lot of capital are really proud of spending the capital They also have no choice There's a slight little fun anecdote, which is your Morse Chang founded the company But the first CEO was a guy by name Jim Dykes who happens to be the general manager I worked under a GE and when they closed He went there so you know it's one big family enterprise here And the other anecdote I like to bring up you know when we talked about those customers that use our stuff and we learned from I don't know if you recognize the the names Chris Malakowski and Curtis cream of course Well, they were at Sun Microsystems and they were among our first customers and actually very good guys to work with We know them extremely well and then a few years later Jensen showed up because he was the caretaker from LSA logic because that is where A Sun manufactured its chips and of course then they teamed up I forget to which year with 93 or something like that And so you know of those three companies We are proud to say that we are the ones that have survived the longest Hahaha So scene you got to tell us the story so I was watching and then we'll come back to Everything else that that we're talking about here But I was watching the keynote and it appeared that maybe Jensen arrived like literally seconds before he was about to run on stage Because it was that maybe concurrent with the week of gtc Yes, yes It's funny my team thought I was joking like I was setting it up this way I'm like, no, I mean it.

26:00When I went on stage, he was not there yet. He was not in the building. But he was texting. He's like, I'm in the parking lot. I'm like, okay, great. I'm about to hop on stage. So, you know, initially the idea was about four, five minutes then I bring him on stage. And I'm looking at the clock, ticking. I'm like, let me burn more time. Then I'm like, all right, should I continue with my presentation or wait? Yeah, it was live. I'm sure this exists in other industries, but it has to be a very special thing in your industry that sometimes there's a company that becomes an unbelievably important company in the world.

26:41And you sort of get to be a huge partner to them in that success. I mean, it's absolutely fair to say that there's no chance and video could do what they do without Synopsis software. How do you think about the role and sort of the importance in the world that you've really become? As I mentioned in the keynote, I wanna say even in Jensen's words, because I was not pulling words in his mouth, that the Synopsis is mission critical to Nvidia's success. We don't take that lightly. When we know we are mission critical to many billions of dollars of our customers revenue, it's a huge responsibility.

27:20It's a responsibility to continue on innovating because they're aspiring to build the bigger product, the next big thing. And if our software and our support, our ecosystem engagement is not able to stay ahead, I don't wanna say with them ahead. So when they're ready, we have it. It won't happen. And right now where it's happening is with our chip customers as they're architecting the future product and with Foundry. And those two are becoming so important. So there's a triangle always us customer Foundry that we are working on architecture, on physics and manufacturing and software to bring it all together.

28:06And I wanna say that has accelerated in terms of being interconnected in the FinFET world. When the transistors start moving to more complicated manufacturing. And of course the last five, six, seven years, when we say it's impossible to design and manufacturing those chips without our contribution as an industry, it's not an overstatement. There's sort of also a historical perspective that, yeah, we can only be thankful for that we were part of this. While now it feels old, Moore's law essentially was the exhibit of what an exponential is. And an exponential is easily the toughest mother of mathematical function because staying on that sucker, damn, it's going fast, right?

28:57We were lucky that we had seminal technology at a moment where seminal technology was needed again to move forward and continue to move at an unbelievable speed, not necessarily exactly the exponential that Gordon had predicted but still the exponential that changed mankind, right? I think this is an important point that I don't wanna just gloss over here. People take Moore's law as if it's some derived from the natural universe property, the same way of like F equals MA or something. It's not, it literally relies on companies like Synopsis getting clever again. Like every time Moore's law happens, it's because somebody got clever again and oh my God, we just barely made it.

29:38You're the cause of it, not the results of it. Well, it's interesting because Moore's law of course started just as an observation, right? He had seen this curve as moving up rapidly and then he made some prediction that it probably would continue for a while. That prediction then became sort of, well, you have to do it because otherwise, you're not, you're not with the team here, right? The race is on and then that race itself started to self -time itself against that and by the way, that includes also the different switches to the different sizes of wafers, the ability to manufacture. And it was not always the perfect exponential, but the gestalt of it was absolutely.

30:18And this is not something new in humankind's history. The printing press had exactly the same characteristic. Oh, in essentially 50 years from virtually zero books it went to 20 million and changed the world and of course, in many ways, the industrial aids have the same characteristic again. What is so exceptional about this one is, if we look at what we have done, synopsis, we've contributed about 10 million X in productivity. 10 million X. And you say, well, I know, are you gonna do another 0 .5 now? Hell no, we need to do another 10 to 100, 2000 X. And of course, that's not gonna be possible with just doing that on one chip and I'm sure we'll get to the whole notion of Sysmore and how that is changing things.

31:05But what is important are two things. One is that in order to stay on that exponential, you need to race like crazy. And the way you do that is you race with people that are crazier than you. With other words, you go to those customers that are even more paranoid of not being successful and that are thankful but never happy. That's a polite version. That's a good version. And they drive you crazy. And we've had the good fortune to, I wanna say for, I don't know, 75 % of our products always be the state of the earth for all this time, right? So we've been there and I like to compare it sometimes to the two of the fronts.

31:46You see all these guys biking like crazy. And then suddenly there's three guys that move away from the pull -it -on and by the time those three guys are a couple of hundred yards away, the others will never catch up. And there's a reason for that. The others cannot team up well enough whereas those three guys by necessity and by scale, you know, every 15 seconds or whatever, they change the guys up front but they chase each other until the last hundred yards and then it's everybody's on their own. But in our case, the race never finishes. Our tour to France is now 37 years and you need to keep going at it.

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34:22And it requires, you know, ASML to make an even better laser. And it requires the EDA software to become even better and requires the cleverness of the chip designer. And everything has to work together in the same generation at the same time betting on each other's dependencies. Does it feel to you that eking out that next generation performance gain is harder than ever or has it always felt this hard? Well, I would say it always felt this hard. I think it's different than it was, but in the description that you gave, you have a relationship between the Foundry and the equipment vendors. And you mentioned ASML -applied materials.

35:00Those would be the ones that essentially focus on so how many atoms, specifically, and ASML would be focusing on how many photons do you need to get at which frequency in order to get really small lines? By the way, we are in that domain too, because synopsis is the leader in T -Caps, technology computer -aided design, which is yet another simulation or modeling, if you like, of the truly minuschool. And then, at the same time, you alluded to the fact that you have to align how you design with the building blocks that you have available. And you can say, well, let's optimize the building blocks for what you're designing, or let's optimize what you're designing for the building blocks that you have.

35:42This is often called DTC or Design Technology Co -Optimization, where synopsis is a leader in. And what you notice in this story is, they do the designs, they do the manufacturing, but we make it all happen. Somebody builds the Lego block, somebody does the castle, we make sure that all these things hang together. Well, I agree art, it's always been difficult, but I'll say the last six plus years, it's been much more difficult. Or, and the reason I'm saying that if you look at synopsis relationship with Foundry, say six, seven years ago, we used to get input from Foundry called enablement, and you enable whatever they create in our product, and you provide the product to the customer.

36:28So you become the bridge between Foundry customer, some I call Dr. Company Designing on that Foundry, through enablement. So you take whatever they created, and then you put it in your product, and you give it to the customer. The last five, six years, it's impossible any longer to just do enablement. We sit with hundreds of engineers at TSMC, at Samsung, at Intel, at GF, sitting during the process development, the technology development, it's no longer enablement because enablement is impossible. You have to invent stuff with them to see, will your physics, the way you're pushing it, will it handle the design you're aspiring to design on it?