Specialised microchip design manages signals at the cutting edge of wireless technology, which is an astounding work of miniaturisation and engineering. However, they’re difficult and expensive to design.
Now, researchers at Princeton Engineering and the Indian Institute of Technology have harnessed artificial intelligence to take a key step toward slashing the time and cost of microchip design and discovering new functionalities to meet expanding demands for better wireless speed and performance.
They used AI to create complicated electromagnetic structures and associated circuits in microchips based on the design parameters. What used to take weeks of highly skilled work can now be accomplished in hours.
Moreover, the AI behind the new system has produced a new microchip design featuring unusual circuitry patterns.
Kaushik Sengupta, the lead researcher, said the designs were unintuitive and unlikely to be developed by a human mind. But they frequently offer marked improvements over even the best standard chips.
“We are coming up with structures that are complex and look random shaped, and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better,” he explained.
Towards energy-efficient microchip design
These circuits can be engineered towards more energy-efficient operation or be made operable across an enormous frequency range that is not currently possible.
Furthermore, the new microchip designs inherently complex structures in minutes, while conventional algorithms may take weeks. In some cases, the new methodology can create structures that are impossible to synthesise with current techniques.
Uday Khankhoje, a co-author and associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras, said: “AI powers not just the acceleration of time-consuming electromagnetic simulations, but also enables exploration into a hitherto unexplored design space and delivers stunning, high-performance devices that run counter to the usual rules of thumb and human intuition.”
Issues with existing microchip design
Wireless microchips are a combination of standard electronic circuits like those in computer chips and electromagnetic structures, including antennas, resonators, signal splitters, combiners and others.
These combinations of elements are put together in every circuit block, carefully handcrafted and co-designed to operate optimally. This method is then scaled to other circuits, sub-systems and systems, making the design process extremely complex and time-consuming, particularly for modern, high-performance chips behind applications like wireless communication, autonomous driving, radar and gesture recognition.
“Classical designs carefully put these circuits and electromagnetic elements together, piece by piece, so that the signal flows in the way we want it to flow in the chip. By changing those structures, we incorporate new properties,” Sengupta said.
It can be hard to comprehend the vastness of a microchip’s design space. The circuitry in an advanced chip is so small, and the geometry so detailed that the number of possible configurations for a chip exceeds the number of atoms in the Universe.
There is no way for a person to understand that level of complexity, so human designers don’t try. They build chips from the bottom up, adding components as needed and adjusting the design as they build.
How the use of AI overcomes these issues
The researchers have used AI to develop electromagnetic structures that are co-designed with circuits to create broadband amplifiers.
Future research will involve linking multiple structures and designing entire wireless chips with the AI microchip design.
Sengupta said: “Now that this has shown promise, there is a larger effort to think about more complicated systems and designs
He concluded: “This is just the tip of the iceberg regarding what the future holds for the field.”
