Google Lab Taps AI In Designing Chips.

"Researchers at Google DeepMind have discovered a more efficient and automated method of designing computer chips using artificial intelligence, which the lab's parent company, Alphabet, said could improve its own specialized AI chip.

The focus on building faster, more-efficient chips comes as semiconductor heavyweights like Nvidia and AMD race to provide the computing power for businesses' ever-growing demand for generative AI capabilities. But cloud-computing giants like Google and Amazon.com, too, have been designing their own AI chips, and betting that their homegrown hardware can be faster and less costly to run than the competition.

Google said it is exploring the use of its "latest AI breakthroughs" to improve its custom AI chips, called Tensor Processing Units or TPUs.

For London-based DeepMind, which recently unveiled an AI system that can discover faster algorithms, a goal of using AI techniques like deep learning is to make computing systems -- from network resources to data centers and chips -- more efficient and sustainable, said DeepMind research scientist Vinod Nair.

Applications like ChatGPT, drones and self-driving cars now run on task-focused chips like digital-signal processors and Nvidia's coveted graphics processors.

DeepMind's AI-based approach, which it began working on about 18 months ago, focuses on making improvements to logic synthesis, a chip-design phase that involves turning a description of a circuit's behavior into the actual circuit.

Computer chips are made up of millions of logic circuits or "building blocks," said Sergio Guadarrama, a DeepMind senior staff software engineer. While it is easy to optimize a few of them manually, it is impossible to tackle millions of them, he said.

By applying AI to speed up the design of logic circuits, DeepMind's goal is to make the design of specialized chips more automated, efficient and less reliant solely on the work of human hardware engineers." [1]

1. Google Lab Taps AI In Designing Chips. Lin, Belle. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 21 July 2023: B.4.