Silvaco Group (Nasdaq: SVCO) and NVIDIA are teaming up to move the TCAD and EDA vendor's physics-based simulation tools onto GPU-accelerated computing, the companies announced July 26. The collaboration pairs Silvaco's semiconductor and multiphysics modeling software with NVIDIA's CUDA-X libraries, PhysicsNeMo, Omniverse libraries, Cosmos, and Nemotron open models, aiming at what Silvaco calls "unprecedented speed and accuracy" in digital twins for chip design and fab operations.
As a proof point, Silvaco ran a fully scaled 3D FDTD simulation of a photonic edge coupler containing 3.2 billion mesh nodes on 32 NVIDIA GPUs linked over NVLink, finishing in under four hours. The same workload did not converge at all on CPUs, according to the company. The GPU run matched physical measurement to within 0.15 dB. For engineers who have watched large-mesh photonic or device simulations time out or grind for days on CPU clusters, that convergence gap is the detail worth noting, not just the runtime.
The partnership spans four areas: GPU-accelerated device, process, photonics, and multiphysics simulation; AI surrogate models built with PhysicsNeMo to speed up design-space exploration; digital twin visualization through Omniverse and Cosmos for shared views of fabs, manufacturing lines, and robotics; and cloud-native workflows meant to let distributed teams run large simulations without local hardware. Silvaco says the combination is intended to compress simulation cycles from weeks to days and to support factory optimization and predictive manufacturing alongside chip design work.
"The convergence of physics-based simulation, accelerated computing, and artificial intelligence is transforming design and manufacturing," said Walden C. Rhines, president and CEO of Silvaco. Da Yang, senior director of product, semiconductor and EDA at NVIDIA, said the goal is to help customers "move faster from modeling to insight across semiconductor design and manufacturing."
Neither company gave a timeline for when GPU-accelerated versions of Silvaco's simulation tools will reach general availability, and pricing for the combined offering has not been disclosed.
