Synopsys and Amazon Web Services have signed a multi-year agreement worth more than $1bn covering intellectual property licenses for semiconductor design. The partnership strengthens Synopsys’ chip design IP business, while AWS is already developing several processor families in-house.
Synopsys is best known for its software used to design complex semiconductors, notably by Nvidia and Intel to lay out tens of billions of transistors on a few square millimeters of silicon. The group also runs a licensing business for pre-designed building blocks that can be integrated directly into customers’ chips.
That unit generated $1.75bn in revenue in the last fiscal year and puts Synopsys in competition in particular with Arm Holdings. Initially focused on relatively standard components, the business is now expanding into more complex technologies, including compute cores. The AWS deal will therefore cover designs optimized for certain specific…
