As its rivalry with Ansys (ANSS.O) intensifies, Cadence Design Systems (CDNS.O) announced on Thursday that it has created a new artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer system that can be used to mimic how air flows over jets and other gear.
Cadence is well known for its software that aids in the design of computer chips, the competitiveness and speed of which are determined by the exact arrangement of tens of billions of tiny electrical switches called transistors.
However, the San Jose, California-based business is vying with its main rival Synopsys (SNPS.O) to combine applications for designing and testing chips with those for designing and testing the broader mechanical systems that those chips are integrated into.
In a $35 billion deal last month, Synopsys acquired Cadence, a company that produces physics simulation software for testing fluid dynamics such as airflow, from Ansys, which had initially piqued Cadence’s interest in acquisition.
According to Frank Ham, vice president of research and development for computational fluid dynamics at Cadence, engineers and designers of aircraft seldom have enough time to test every aspect of their designs and still meet business deadlines because physics simulation software like Cadence’s demands such a large amount of processing power.
Cadence unveiled the Millennium M1, a device designed to accelerate tests so engineers can run more of them, on Thursday. Additionally, it will employ AI to comb through the massive volumes of data produced by those tests in order to suggest enhancements that engineers with limited time may have overlooked.
“There’s no human that’s reading all of the results of those simulations, and some of the design innovations that are buried in there are going be teased out,” Ham stated in a recent interview.
Regarding the system’s price, Cadence opted not to comment. Depending on the customer’s preferences, it will offer the system for sale or rental, and it is instantly available.
