Ansys Simulation World Convenes in Silicon Valley

This month, Ansys Simulation World took place in the heart of Silicon Valley, in the local Hyatt Regency hotel that also doubles as the convention center. One of the keynote speakers was Prith Banerjee, former CTO of Ansys, current Senior VP of Simulation and Analysis Incubation Group at Synopsys. Banerjee discussed simulation's evolution from physical prototyping with clay models to the current use of AI-driven tools.

"Physics doesn't lie. If you could model the physics accurately, you could predict whether the plane would fly or not, whether the car would crash or not, and so on. This is the vision, and we are on the journey to zero physical prototyping, powered by HPC, AI, and the cloud," said Banerjee in his keynote.

Synopsys recently completed the acquisition of Ansys, creating a company with a combined software portfolio that covers silicon design, semiconductor intellectual property, FEA, CFD, electronics, materials intelligence, embedded software. 

The Shift to Digital Control

Banerjee also hosted a panel discussion called Designing Chips to Systems for an AI-Driven World, featuring speakers from Synopsys, Microsoft, AMD, and NVIDIA. 

During the panel, Alex Starr, VP and Fellow at AMD, said, "Certainly, 3D IC is our future. We definitely go up in multiple layers, with different stacking technologies. We've invested a lot in packaging, stacking technology."

Ravi Subramanian, Chief Product Management Officer, Synopsys, noted the shift from physical to electronic versions of products. "In a very simple example, you had fuel injectors, and now electronic fuel injectors; you also had braking control, and then electronic braking control ... The fundamental paradigm in many industries is, more and more forms of controls are moving to digital control." 

Evolution of Simulation

In his keynote, Banerjee discussed SimAI, a new software for developing Reduced Order Models (ROMs) from archival simulation results. The software "basically takes any of our solvers as a black box, trains AI models, and runs simulation much faster," he said.

Banerjee also talked about the emergence of copilots, or AI-powered assistants. In most implementations, the current copilots answer the users questions, on the best mesh to use for a specific simulation, the placement of loads, and the likes. But he also foresees a change in the horizon. 

"Instead of answering your question, the copilot can actually do the settings. That's where it is headed. These are based on hundreds of designs that you have done. So if you are a designer and you like a particular form of design, in the future, the copilot will be personalized to you," he explained.

For more, watch the exclusive video interview below: