By Max A. Cherney
(Reuters) – Silicon Valley-based Synopsys and startup firm SiMa.ai announced on Tuesday a partnership aimed at accelerating the development of new artificial intelligence chips for automakers and their suppliers.
Synopsys, among leading manufacturers of chip-design software, will collaborate with SiMa.ai, a company that has designed energy-efficient hardware and software capable of handling diverse AI functions used in cars. This feature is important in electric vehicles where the car’s chips compete for battery power with the drive systems.
SiMa.ai, also based in Silicon Valley, aims to design systems that can handle varying functions such as computer vision technology used in driver-assistance systems that help keep cars from veering out of their lanes to the voice assistants that can listen for driver requests to change a radio station.
Both tasks fall under the umbrella of AI, but the hardware and software involved are very different. Under the new partnership, Synopsys users will gain access to SiMa.ai’s intellectual property and Synopsys’ tools for simulating how a chip and software will interact.
That will allow automakers or their suppliers to pick the best combination of the two for the task at hand. Synopsys and SiMa.ai did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
“The software world is changing so much for them,” said Ravi Subramanian, head of the Synopsys product management and markets group. “They really need to master their compute destiny.”
Krishna Rangasayee, founder and CEO of SiMa.ai, said that technologies like voice assistants are likely to be integrated into cars within the next three years. However, these technologies currently run on power-hungry chips in data centers, so they need to be adapted for use in cars.
“What we have built is really a very energy efficient AI solution that fits in the power envelope and the performance envelope of what our customers want,” Rangasayee said.
(Reporting by Max Cherney in San Francisco; Writing by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
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