AI can design chips no human could, said Bill Dally in a virtual keynote today at the Design Automation Conference (DAC), one of the world's largest gatherings of semiconductor engineers.
The chief scientist of NVIDIA discussed research in accelerated computing and machine learning that's making chips smaller, faster and better.
Our work shows you can achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in chip design using GPU-accelerated systems. And when you add in AI, you can get superhuman results - better circuits than anyone could design by hand, said Dally, who leads a team of more than 200 people at NVIDIA Research.
Gains Span Circuits, Boards Dally cited improvements GPUs and AI deliver across the workflow of chip and board design. His examples spanned the layout and placement of circuits to faster ways to render images of printed-circuit boards.
In one particularly stunning example of speedups with GPUs, he pointed to research NVIDIA plans to present at a conference next year. The GATSPI tool accelerates detailed simulations of a chip's logic by more than 1,000x compared to commercial tools running on CPUs today.
GATSPI, a GPU-accelerated simulation tool, completes work in seconds that currently takes a full day running on a CPU. A paper at DAC this year describes how NVIDIA collaborated with Cadence Design Systems, a leading provider of EDA software, to render board-level designs using graphics techniques on NVIDIA GPUs. Their work boosted performance up to 20x for interactive operations on Cadence's Allegro X platform, announced in June.
Engineers used to wait for programs to respond after every edit or pan across an image - it was an awkward, frustrating way to work. But with GPUs, the flow becomes truly interactive, said Dally, who chaired Stanford University's computer science department before joining NVIDIA in 2009.
Reinforcement Learning Delivers Rewards A technique called NVCell, described in a DAC session this week, uses reinforcement learning to automate the job of laying out a standard cell, a basic building block of a chip.
The approach reduces work that typically takes months for a 10-person team to an automated process that runs in a couple days. That lets the engineering team focus on a few challenging cells that need to be designed by hand, said Dally.
In another example of the power of reinforcement learning, NVIDIA researchers will describe at DAC a new tool called PrefixRL. It discovers how to design a circuit such as an adder, encoder or custom design.
PrefixRL treats the design process like a game where the high score is in finding the smallest area and power consumption for the circuit.
By letting AI optimize the process, engineers get a device that's more efficient than what's possible with today's tools. It's a good example of how AI can deliver designs no human could.
Leveraging AI's Tool Box NVIDIA worked with the University of Texas at Austin on a research project called DREAMPlace that made novel use of PyTorch, a popular software framework for deep learning. It adapted the framework used to optimize weights in a neural network to find the best spot to place a block with 10 million cells inside a larger chip.
It's a routine job that currently takes nearly four hours using today's state-of-the-art techniques on CPUs. Running on NVIDIA Volta architecture GPUs in a data center or cloud service, it can finish in as little as five minutes, a 43x speedup.
Getting a Clearer Image Faster To make a chip, engineers use a lithography machine to project their design onto a semiconductor wafer. To make sure the chip performs as expected, they must accurately simulate that image, a critical challenge.
NVIDIA researchers created a neural network that understands the optical process. It simulated the image on the wafer 80x faster and with higher accuracy, using a 20x smaller model than current state-of-the-art machine learning methods.
It's one more example of how the combination of accelerated computing and AI are helping engineers design better chips faster.
An AI-Powered Future NVIDIA used some of these techniques to make our existing GPUs, and we plan to use more of them in the future, Dally said.
I expect tomorrow's standard EDA tools will be AI-powered to make the chip designer's job easier and their results better than ever, he said.
To watch Dally's keynote, register for a complimentary pass to DAC using the code ILOVEDAC, then view the talk here.
North America Stories
14/06/2026
HBO Comedy Rooster Shot with URSA Cine 17K 65
Brie Clayton June 14, 2026
0 Comments
Large format brings viewers intimately close to characters.
Black...
13/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
YES Network and The Gotham Sports App will air seven Athletes Unlimited Softball...
12/06/2026
The United Football League will host its FAST Innovation Suite at the 2026 United Bowl presented by Credit One Bank on Saturday, June 13 at 3:00 p.m. ET at Audi...
12/06/2026
PTZOptics and LayerJot will present live demonstrations at InfoComm 2026 showing how natural-language AI prompting, robotic camera control, and on-device comput...
12/06/2026
MultiDyne Video and Fiber Optic Systems will exhibit at InfoComm 2026, featuring...
12/06/2026
Ateme has announced that Eurovision Services is using Ateme's software-based frame-rate conversion technology for international live event workflows. The de...
12/06/2026
Bitmovin and Simplestream have announced a partnership with Xperi to simplify the launch of OTT streaming services on TiVo OS smart TVs and devices. The collabo...
12/06/2026
Net Insight has announced that a multinational technology company is deploying a...
12/06/2026
MLB Players Inc., the business arm of the MLB Players Association, has announced a partnership with Athletes First to develop and sell brand partnerships across...
12/06/2026
Guntermann and Drunck (G&D) and VuWall have announced the CommandKeyboard-Advanc...
12/06/2026
Comcast Smart Solutions announces a new smart technology deployment with Major L...
12/06/2026
Elevation Worship completed the initial leg of its Elevation Nights 2026 tour ...
12/06/2026
AJA Video Systems has announced KONA IP25 support for Colorfront Transkoder and ...
12/06/2026
Audinate Group Limited (ASX: AD8) will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth C7321, Ce...
12/06/2026
Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould has announced the appointment of Scott Adametz as Chief Technology Officer. The Pac-12 describes the hire as the first CTO appo...
12/06/2026
Grass Valley has announced AMPP Edge Live, a production system combining Grass Valley hardware, NVIDIA Blackwell GPU acceleration, and AMPP OS in a single platf...
12/06/2026
At one time a trailblazer with the launch of the Longhorn Network, the Universit...
12/06/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent rating news and is derived from press rel...
12/06/2026
Chyron has announced PAINT 10.4, an update to its illustrated replay and sports ...
12/06/2026
SVP, Production, Mark Gross: With the new schedule, with not having every Sunday night, it has given us an opportunity to take a step back and reimagine what o...
12/06/2026
For Televisa Technical Engineering Manager Roberto N nez Ibarra and the small team of 12 technicians and two production personnel at the IBC things are already ...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
AJA Announces KONA IP25 Integration with Colorfront Software
Brie Clayton June 12, 2026
0 Comments
Collaboration enables uncompressed SMPTE ST 2110 I/O ...
12/06/2026
URSA Cine 12K LF Used to Create Visuals for STUTS' K-Arena Concert
Brie Clayton June 12, 2026
0 Comments
Organic visuals projected on a giant scre...
12/06/2026
MTI FILM Acquires Mango New Edit, Expanding its Global Post-Production Services ...
12/06/2026
AI Point Tracking Speeds Up Complex VFX Tracks in Mocha Pro
Jessie Electa Petrov June 12, 2026
0 Comments
The 2026.5 release adds automatic point trac...
12/06/2026
Bitmovin, a provider of video streaming solutions, has partnered with Simplestream, a provider of OTT and broadcast solutions, and technology provider Xperi, to...
12/06/2026
Leostream Corporation, creator of the world-leading Leostream Remote Desktop Access Platform, today announced Jigsaw24, a leading B2B IT solutions provider wit...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
AgentPerf from Artificial Analysis, the industry's first agentic AI benchmark, gives developers, enterprises and infrastructure providers a clear way to com...
12/06/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Unveils First-Look Images from Villaflor, Santiago Mitre's New Film
Entertainment
12 June 2026
GlobalArgentina
Link copied to ...
12/06/2026
Back to All News
Cross the Boundaries of the Real World into the Spirit Realm i...
12/06/2026
A fentanyl countermeasure that adapts to combat future black-market drugs Scripps Research scientists developed a vaccine that teaches the immune system to rapi...
11/06/2026
The immense size of the tourney and its Atlantic-spanning operation also disting...
11/06/2026
Nielsen has released a new soccer fandom consumer research report, The Fans Behind The Game: FIFA World Cup 2026 Edition, examining the soccer audience in the...
11/06/2026
Telemundo will launch its FIFA World Cup 2026 coverage on Thursday, June 11 with...
11/06/2026
FuboTV Inc. has announced a distribution agreement with NBCUniversal. Fubo customers can now stream Telemundo and Universo, with NBC Sports Network (NBCSN), NBC...
11/06/2026
DAZN has announced its in-app features for FIFA World Cup 2026 coverage in Spain...
11/06/2026
Roblox has released the 2026 Roblox Digital Expression Report: Wave 4 - Sports D...
11/06/2026
FIFA has unveiled DNA, the Official FIFA World Cup 2026 Anthem, performed by A...
11/06/2026
ESPN will provide English- and Spanish-language news and information coverage of FIFA World Cup 2026 across its U.S. media platforms from June 11 through July 1...
11/06/2026
The latest product of the outstanding RIT Sports Network program, this recent grad from Long Island is carving out a promising path in broadcast engineering
In...
AI can design chips no human could, said Bill Dally in a virtual keynote today at the Design Automation Conference (DAC), one of the world's largest gatherings of semiconductor engineers.
