As the US-China technology war escalates, both countries are racing to ensure autonomy in key technologies. As Washington tightens access to advanced chip tools, China has stepped up efforts to break its dependence on Western software.
In a major step forward, China's leading scientific body has announced a system developed by the country itself. The technology uses AI to automate chip design, a field that has long been dominated by US companies.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has launched an AI-powered chip design platform called QiMeng. QiMeng takes advantage of large language models to automate complex chip design tasks. Developers have opened the system source code on GitHub and published detailed technical documents in a recent research paper.
The research team said that good engineers in the world took many weeks to design automatic driving chips, but QiMeng only produced them in a few days. QiMeng is built around 3 layers of function with the platform being a separate processing chip model. Above are design factors that handle both hardware and software. The top layer contains many different chip-designed microchips.
These components work together to support automatic front-end design, creating a language for describing hardware, operating system cau hinh, and toolkits. The research paper also shows that future testing will promote the self-development of the system.
Using this platform, the researchers built two processors QiMeng-CPU-v1 and QiMeng-CPU-v2 equivalent to Intel's 486 chip and Arm's Cortex A53.
