SBIR Phase I: Artificial Intelligence Enhanced Design Automation for General Engineering Systems

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve the prototyping and verification pipeline for advanced semiconductor products that require multiphysics simulations. This will impact the design of multi-chip modules, emerging semiconductor devices, and novel analog circuits, all of which are likely to form the basis of next-generation electronics. Current electronic design automation (EDA) software used by semiconductor companies often cannot be used to design these technologies as EDA often lacks sufficient modular and detailed models, such as thermal and mechanical physics. This project will develop a new EDA software toolset to address these needs, allowing designers to dramatically reduce development cost/time and open the door to new products that are currently too challenging to design. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop physical modeling algorithms to link new physics into the electronic design automation (EDA) pipeline. Existing modeling tools for components, such as transistors in state-of-the-art technologies, employ either slow finite element analysis or highly specialized compact models. These limitations will be overcome by developing new algorithms to convert complex physics into efficient modular models. This project will produce an EDA tool based on the new algorithms that (1) are generalizable to a wide range of components without manual tuning, (2) have high accuracy, and (3) execute fast. This EDA tool will be integrated into the EDA toolchain, retaining interoperability with existing design and optimization software. The performance of the integrated EDA tool will then be validated against circuit simulations of op-amps and finite element analysis simulations of multi-chip modules in order to demonstrate fast and accurate system evaluation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.