3 days ago
China's AI chip tool QiMeng beats engineers, designs processors in just days
As the US-China tech war intensifies, both nations are racing to secure independence in critical technologies. With Washington tightening access to advanced chip tools, Beijing is ramping up efforts to break its reliance on Western software.
In a major step, China's top scientific body has unveiled a homegrown, AI-powered system to automate chip design, an area long dominated by American firms.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has launched an AI-driven chip design platform called QiMeng, meaning 'enlightenment' in Chinese.
Developed by the State Key Laboratory of Processor, the Intelligent Software Research Centre, and the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the system aims to accelerate semiconductor development and reduce dependency on human programmers.
QiMeng leverages large language models to automate complex chip design tasks.
The developers open-sourced the system on GitHub and published detailed technical documentation in a recent research paper.
The team added that an autonomous-driving chip, which would take human engineers weeks to complete, could be produced by QiMeng in just a few days.
QiMeng is built around three functional layers. The foundation is a domain-specific processor chip model. Above that is a design agent that handles both hardware and software aspects. The top layer contains various chip design applications.
These components work together to support automated front-end design, generation of hardware description language, OS configuration, and compiler toolchain creation. The research paper notes that future iterations will boost the system's capacity for self-evolution.
Using the platform, researchers have built two processors: QiMeng-CPU-v1, which is comparable to Intel's 486 chip, and QiMeng-CPU-v2, which aligns with Arm's Cortex A53.
The launch of QiMeng comes at a time when the US is pressuring major electronic design automation (EDA) software vendors to stop selling to Chinese firms. Companies like Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens EDA, who together held 82% of China's EDA market last year, have been hit by fresh export restrictions from the US Commerce Department, according to a Morgan Stanley report cited by SCMP.
QiMeng is a direct attempt to replace reliance on these Western firms. 'The goal was to improve efficiency, reduce costs and shorten development cycles when compared to manual methods,' said the CAS team in their paper.
The system also aims to enable rapid customisation of domain-specific chip architectures and software stacks.
As AI advances demand more powerful chips, China's ability to design and fabricate them locally becomes crucial. While the country still lags behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in advanced chip fabrication, efforts like QiMeng are intended to close the gap in design capabilities.
The developers acknowledged remaining hurdles, citing 'constrained fabrication technology, limited resources and a diverse ecosystem.'
Still, they hope QiMeng will help automate the full chip design and verification process in the long run.
