Google researchers show artificial intelligence can design microchips better and faster than humans

Researchers at Google have shown that artificial intelligence can design microchips of equal or better quality than humans in far less time.

This is an Inside Science story. Artificial intelligence can design computer microchips that perform at least as well as those designed by human experts, devising such blueprints thousands of times faster. This new research from Google is already helping with the design of microchips for the company's next generation of AI computer systems. The process of designing the physical layout of a chip's parts, known as floor planning, is key to a device's ultimate performance. This complex task often requires months of intense efforts from experts, and despite five decades of research, no automated floorplanning technique has reached human-level performance until now. In the new study, the researchers had AI software treat floorplanning as a game, said study co-lead author Azalia Mirhoseini, a computer scientist at Google Research's Brain Team in Mountain View, California. In this approach, the chip's computation cores, memory controllers and other elements are the pieces, the canvas on which they sit is the board, and a winning result is optimal performance according to a range of values such as chip size and power usage.