Synopsys Inc. has officially announced the next phase of its work with NVIDIA to accelerate chip design up to 30 times faster, using the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform.
According to certain reports, the company took this opportunity to reveal that it is leveraging NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries to optimize its solutions for next-generation semiconductor development, while simultaneously expanding support for the NVIDIA Grace CPU architecture and enabling more than 15 Synopsys solutions in 2025.
More on the same would reveal how Synopsys and NVIDIA are advancing a multi-year collaborative effort to accelerate electronic design automation (EDA) workloads. Not just that, Synopsys is also applying NVIDIA accelerated compute architectures, including the NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, to achieve significant, projected runtime gains for workflows, including circuit simulation, computational lithography, Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD), physical verification, and materials engineering.
“Chip design is one of the most complex engineering challenges in human history,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA Blackwell and CUDA-X, Synopsys is cutting simulation times from days to hours—advancing chip design to power the AI revolution.”
Talk about these workflows on a slightly deeper level, we begin from circuit simulation. Now, we touched upon how Synopsys PrimeSim™ SPICE simulation workloads are projected to achieve a 30x speed up by utilizing the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform, but what we haven’t mentioned yet is how NVIDIA accelerated computing architectures can also tread up a long distance to facilitate simulation of challenging circuits.
This they do to achieve signoff with SPICE-level accuracy, and therefore, reduce runtimes from days to hours.
Next up, we must expand upon the workflow related to computational lithography. Here, the idea is to leverage Synopsys Proteus™, which has been a production-proven choice to accelerate computational lithography for more than two decades. By banking upon such a setup, users can access optical proximity correction (OPC) software and inverse imaging technology (ILT) to resolve challenges at leading technology nodes.
In fact, as of today, Synopsys Proteus is optimized for NVIDIA H100 GPUs and integrated with the NVIDIA cuLitho library, achieving a 15x speed up of OPC. As for the future, thanks to NVIDIA Blackwell platform, the solution in question should be able to accelerate computational lithography simulations by up to 20x.
Then, there is a workflow focused on TCAD simulation. Here, early results predict that applying GPU-enabled capabilities and NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries to the Synopsys Sentauras™ TCAD process and device simulation solution can accelerate time to results up to 10x.
Rounding up highlights would be the thought spared for materials engineering, an area where Synopsys will deploy its QuantumATK® to deliver atomic-scale modeling for semiconductor and materials research and development. Furthermore, the company will put CUDA-X libraries next to the NVIDIA Hopper architecture for the purpose of accelerating time to results by almost 100x, thus empowering customers to simulate and analyze a wide range of materials with greater efficiency.
The development in question delivers a rather interesting follow-up to Synopsys and NVDIA’s efforts towards speeding chip design with generative AI and NVIDIA NIM microservices. You see, customers using Synopsys’ Gen AI-powered knowledge assistant, Synopsys.ai Copilot, are currently realizing an average 2x productivity improvement, as compared to prior methods.
“At GTC, we’re unveiling the latest performance results observed across our leading portfolio when optimizing Synopsys solutions for the NVIDIA Blackwell platform to accelerate computationally-intensive chip design workflows,” said Sassine Ghazi, president and CEO of Synopsys. “Synopsys technology is mission-critical to the productivity and capabilities of engineering teams from silicon to systems. By harnessing the performance of NVIDIA accelerated computing, we can help customers unlock new breakthroughs and deliver innovation even faster.”
