Pervasive Intelligence

The biggest change in technology over the last five or ten years is the sudden kicking into gear of artificial intelligence. I'm sure that you are aware of this. Many people have pointed out that there has been more development in the field since <choose your year here> than in the whole of time before that. There are many proof points of this, and you only have to scan what is going on in technology to come across more every day. I'll pick two, one technical, one business.

The technical one, shown in the graph below, shows the power of object detection in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, as the best approaches have surpassed human ability.

The business one, shown in the chart below, is the amount of venture capital investment going into AI startups. And don't forget, this chart is the US alone, there are more AI startups in China than the US.

Pervasive Intelligence

This is the era of pervasive intelligence, and it is affecting every area of technology. It is providing opportunities and challenges for Cadence's customers to deliver smarter products that deliver more value to their end-users. But it is also enabling Cadence's products to incorporate intelligence to deliver higher performance products, with shorter run-times, and fewer design iterations. We call this Intelligent System Design.

Designing high-performance intelligent systems requires the most advanced semiconductor processes and the most productive approach to design. During the period when both Moore's Law and CPU architecture were both advancing fast, pure software solutions were attractive. But today, both Moore's Law and CPU architecture development have slowed to a crawl, and it is the era of both specialized processors (for running software) and smarter implementation (for functionality implemented in silicon). Very few systems are standalone, they almost all require high-performance connectivity to memories, other parts of bigger systems, and increasingly radios.

Design Excellence

Cadence has the best design tools for designing systems, from the digital flow, the standard platform for analog and custom digital, RF, packaging, printed circuit boards, and the high-performance silicon-tested IP required to build specialized processors for these systems, along with the high-performance capabilities for them to communicate with the outside world.

This is the core of what we do, and will continue to be the heart of Intelligent System Design. After all, intelligent systems are also systems, containing SoCs and boards, and using the technologies that Cadence has developed over decades.

System Innovation

Up a level from that base technology, we also have specialized knowledge in some important areas such a 5G wireless, or high-definition radar for ADAS and autonomous driving. We also work with both partners such as Green Hills and Mathworks, and open-source environments such as TensorFlow and PyTorch (and even open-source software development environments for C++ and other languages). Intelligence in designing systems requires a deep understanding of all the components of specialized flows, whether supplied by Cadence, by our partners, or by the open-source software ecosystem.

Pervasive Intelligence

Putting it all together, pervasive intelligence means putting intelligence everywhere: in our customers' products, in our flows and methodologies, and inside our tools at the algorithmic level. Intelligent System Design produces the highest performance systems in the most productive manner.

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