Motivo: The Next Leap for the Semiconductor Industry
The semiconductor industry is one of the most iconic sectors of the global economy and has led to the rise of computing and numerous technologies. Over the decades, through the introduction of new technologies, the industry has managed to keep up with demand for more complex designs, at ever smaller nodes (geometries) and at larger scales. This is often personified by Moore’s law. The fact that we can put 100 million transistors within a square millimeter of silicon is mind-blowing.
However, as we continue pushing the boundaries, the industry is starting to run into limitations. Design houses face two major issues:
One is that as we get to smaller nodes, the complexity, effort, cost and time to get a new design into production have all increased dramatically. This complexity is exemplified by the exponential growth in the number of rules that a design needs to pass. It takes a lot of time and effort from the design team to pass all these rules.
Motivo
The other is that yields (meaning fraction of chips produced that are good) are low, resulting in higher unit costs. The net result is that the benefits of Moore’s law and chip innovation is increasingly restricted to large companies focused on serving very large market segments. Even the segments served suffer from lower yields and longer ramp times. Despite all these issues, the most advanced nodes (16nm and smaller) represent over half the wafers manufactured by foundries. $50B worth of wafers will be purchased annually at these nodes, and with yields of 70%, the manufacturing losses at these nodes will be over $15B.
Motivo uses AI technologies to address both these concerns and helps fabless companies improve their chip design time to market and manufacturing yields. Their market opportunity is clearly huge. But the potential to have transformational impact on a single design is super exciting. In an industry where time to market is everything, the ability to deliver a chip 3–6 months earlier is a game changer. And the costs savings from yield enhancement on a single design at a single customer can easily be hundreds of millions of dollars! This is pure, incremental profit for their customer!
The Motivo platform can take any physical design or RTL code and map it to a graph model and that can be traversed and searched. This enables the platform to recognize and find patterns in the layout and make millions of improvements automatically and in an intelligent way all within the design rules. The ability to do this quickly, effectively and at a massive scale using AI is a huge shift compared to manual approaches used today that look at each error once at a time. Motivo’s customers have seen significant improvements in yields with no changes to chip performance, area timing and other electrical characteristics and no delays or schedule impacts. And by applying their technologies to aspects of design such as design for test, validation, and timing convergence they are able to shave weeks and months off the schedule for completing a design.
The most exciting aspect of Motivo is the strength of the team. Bharath and his team have been at the forefront of innovation in the industry through their work at some of the leading companies in the space. Their strong focus on delivering material value to their customers through cutting edge explainable AI technology, and their ambitions and willingness to tackle really hard technical and business problems are all hallmarks of a great company. We at Storm are thrilled to join them on their journey to revolutionize the semiconductor sector. The team is hiring aggressively to realize this incredible vision. You can reach them at www.Motivo.AI/careers.