ANSYS improves electronic design automation with SeaScape and SeaHawk.
Simulations are becoming more complex, making high performance computing (HPC) technology work harder to produce results.
What’s worse is that much of the big data produced by simulations goes to waste. To address these issues, ANSYS has released SeaScape to help engineers quickly optimize their designs using elastic computation, machine learning, big data analytics and simulation technology.
ANSYS’ first release of their SeaScape technology will focus on electronic design automation (EDA). Dubbed SeaHawk, this electronic product design software will combine SeaScape’s big data analysis algorithms with ANSYS’ electromagnetic simulation technologies. The goal is to help engineers reduce chip size and power consumption without affecting performance or bumping into any design constraints.
SeaHawk uses a low-memory computer infrastructure to improve the solution time and performance of EDA simulation workflows. Improving the cycle time of these solutions makes it possible to run through design optimization scenarios faster. To optimize the analysis speed, SeaHawk and SeaScape has been designed in collaboration with Intel, and runs on the Intel Xeon and Intel Phi cores.
“The performance increases ANSYS SeaHawk delivers for engineering simulations enable users to freely optimize and innovate designs without constraints,” said Hugo Saleh, director of marketing at the HPC Platform Group at Intel Corporation.”
“The collaboration between Intel and ANSYS continues to deliver innovation and performance for our respective customers, providing great value and performance for reduced time to results. Together with ANSYS, we’re delivering leading simulation capabilities to market utilizing the Intel Scalable System Framework,” Saleh continued.
Some of SeaHawk’s early testers reported that they have reduced their die size by five percent, saving a significant sum when producing the electronic components.
“Die size and development time reduction are targets that electronic design engineers have pursued with marginal success given the limitations of today’s in-design solutions,” said John Lee, general manager at ANSYS.
“ANSYS SeaHawk bridges the in-design and sign-off needs by bringing unprecedented simulation performance and design insights, without sacrificing sign-off accuracy and coverage. We’re excited to offer SeaHawk to the EDA industry today and equally excited to offer other SeaScape-based products across our entire simulation portfolio in the future,” Lee continued.
Big data analytics appears to be making a big splash in the CAE world, with companies like PTC and Autodesk jumping onto the Internet of Things (IoT) bandwagon. The idea here is to collect big data on products in the field, in order to improve the simulations of future designs using a digital twin of the design.
What sets ANSYS apart is that they are looking to use big data starting on day one of a design. However, it would be shocking if the SeaScape technology doesn’t eventually expand to include data collected over the IoT.
For more on ANSYS check out their new simulation platform ANSYS AIM.
