One of the challenges faced by the Chinese chip design industry is the lack of advanced domestic electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Market leaders Cadence and Synopsys are unable to supply the chipmaking software to Chinese entities due to U.S. export controls. Also, until recently, no EDA tools for chip design software could work on China’s domestically produced CPUs. Things are starting to change, and a Chinese firm, Xinhuazhang, introduced its first EDA software that can work on China’s domestically produced processors.

At the Kunpeng Developer Day on April 25, 2024, Xinhuazhang delivered a keynote speech on its progress in developing a domestic EDA platform that can use Huawei’s Kunpeng processors (powered by the Armv8 instruction set architecture) for servers and Phytium’s FeiTeng processors (which use SPARCv9-derived ISA) for supercomputers. This is a significant development for China’s semiconductor industry as domestic chip designers can now design devices and simulate them using solely domestic software and hardware.

Xinhuazhang says it offers a comprehensive suite of EDA tools covering all aspects of digital chip verification, from hardware simulation to system debugging and verification cloud.

Xinhuazhang has completed extensive adaptation and optimization work to port its core EDA software to the Kunpeng platform. This includes adapting the compilation environment, C++/ASM compilation, cmake compilation scripts, and third-party libraries. These efforts ensure compatibility and performance optimizations for Kunpeng server clusters. Xinhuazhang’s products passed Huawei’s OpenLab compatibility test in 2021 and won first place in the Kunpeng Innovation Competition in 2022, a report at X-Epic claims.

According to the company, performance improvements have been notable. Xinhuazhang’s tools, such as GalaxSim and GalaxFV, can now use Huawei Kunpeng-based high-performance clusters and achieve a 2x to 3x simulation performance improvement in multiple customer test cases over non-optimized software. These enhancements significantly reduce simulation testing time and improve system-level chip simulation verification efficiency. Unfortunately, there is no word about optimizations for FeiTeng processors.

In general, this collaboration not only strengthens the Huawei Kunpeng ecosystem but also provides a set of EDA solutions for China’s domestic semiconductor industry.