It’s possible you’ll not have heard of Ansys, but it surely’s within the strategy of being acquired by chip design software agency Synopsys for $35 billion.
That’s taking place as a result of Ansys, an engineering software program firm, specializes within the simulation of the world’s advanced digital methods, and the world of chip design is more and more shifting into the extra advanced world of system design, stated Prith Banerjee, CTO of Ansys, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Ansys spans a number of companies. It really works within the automotive area with carmakers (unique gear producers, or OEMs). It really works with the tier one suppliers within the automobile trade, and it really works with chip corporations which might be making chips for the automobiles and extra. Ansys makes instruments for engineering simulations and extra, stated Banerjee. And he famous that corporations all around the world are embracing AI and machine studying. He can see it in his clients’ simulations.
“With AI and ML, we are able to use simulation much easier as well as much faster. Something that takes a hundred hours to run can run in a matter of minutes, so we have got some techniques to aid us in that area,” Banerjee stated. “AI was big in general at CES. I mean Jensen (Huang, CEO of Nvidia) talked about AI and all the GPUs and so on, but we are embracing AI like never before.”
A parade of companions
Ansys simulation instruments assist corporations design race automobiles.
Ansys is working with a number of corporations. At CES 2025, it unveiled a collaboration with Sony Semiconductor Options to enhance notion system validation in sensible automobiles. Ansys’ options are utilized by greater than 200 automotive and tech corporations that exhibit stuff in Las Vegas every January. Yearly, Ansys tries to shut the hole between engineering design and actuality utilizing the ability of simulation.
It creates digital wind tunnel expertise to optimize F1 racing automobile designs with Oracle Pink Bull Racing, Porsche and Ferrari.
Prith Banerjee is CTO of Ansys.
More and more, this simulation superpower additionally speeds time-to-market, lowers manufacturing prices, improves high quality, and reduces threat.
LightSolver, one other Ansys companion being introduced immediately, says that the fourth industrial revolution, also referred to as Business 4.0, is absolutely underway. Virtually each trade — from automotive and aerospace to client items and healthcare — is demonstrating a shift towards digitalization.
The commercial gear and manufacturing industries aren’t any exception. A international industrial robotics survey revealed that industrial corporations are anticipated to speculate 25% of their capital spending on automation from 2022 to 2027. The survey additionally discovered that automation is already being carried out or piloted for a lot of fashionable industrial duties, together with palletization and packaging, materials dealing with, items receiving, unloading, and storage.
Digital twins are for actual
BMW is constructing a digital twin of a manufacturing unit that can open for actual in 2025.
Banerjee is worked up in regards to the instruments like Nvidia’s Omniverse, which is enabling the creation of digital designs often known as digital twins. With such twins, corporations like BMW are designing automobile factories in a digital area of the Omniverse first. When the design is ideal, they construct the manufacturing unit in the actual world. They outfit the manufacturing unit with sensors that accumulate information and feed it again to the digital design. That makes the digital design higher and creates a suggestions cycle of steady enchancment. That signifies that the simulations of all the pieces from Microsoft Flight Simulator to the automobile factories are getting nearer to actual life.
“Digital twins as a topic is very big for us. Of all the conversations that I had with all customers, we talked most about our concept of hybrid digital twins the most,” Banerjee stated. “The rest of the industry is doing digital twins by putting sensors on the actual assets, right? You’re making a digital model of the asset by just putting in sensors. And we’re using data analytics. What we do in terms of digital twins is physics-based, simulation-based digital twins.”
Hybrid digital twins
A simulation of a entrance wheel of a automobile.
Banerjee added, “We combine it with data analytics to do what is called hybrid digital twins. Sustainability is big for us. So we are driving a lot of things around how to make the world more sustainable, lower carbon emissions using simulations.”
Requested about whether or not Ansys wish to see extra of Nvidia’s digital twin expertise as open supply, Banerjee stated he wish to see open requirements within the ecosystem.
“The faster this whole thing comes, the bigger the opportunities for everyone,” he stated. “It doesn’t help anyone to have four different standards.” Nobody desires to be tied to a single GPU or a single software program stack.
Nvidia is bringing OpenUSD to metaverse-like industrial functions.
Banerjee stated the metaverse is actual, as many corporations are taking it significantly past Meta. He famous these embody Amazon Internet Providers, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia.
“They all have some form of the metaverse. So we believe that the metaverse is real, that that is going to happen. And we, as the leading simulation company, need to integrate with the metaverse,” Banerjee stated. “And what’s it? The metaverse permits you to mix the bodily world with the digital world, which is the idea of digital. For instance, what we deliver to the Omniverse from Nvidia is that they have an answer, a stack.
He added, “The are using their simulators like Isaac, simulating robots and so on, right? But their simulations are kind of at a high level, an approximate simulation. They say it’s a physics-based simulation, but it’s not the level of accuracy that we bring to the table.”
He stated that Ansys is concentrated on physics-based simulations, and the corporate’s work revolves round core physics solvers. These cowl mechanical constructions, fluids and electromagnetic areas.
“These are the four core solvers. We are in discussions with Nvidia and we have an active partnership going on to take each of the solvers to visualize the output so the engineer will see the output on the desktop as it is happening,” Banerjee stated.
He stated the world is shifting to the cloud the world and AI. In that new world of AI plus cloud plus GPUs, the metaverse is the proper strategy to do the person interface and work together with the outcomes of simulation.
“We are working hand-in-hand with Nvidia to make sure our four core solvers are integrated with the Omniverse. So that’s one very core area of collaboration,” he stated.
Requested what he means by hybrid digital twins, Banerjee stated he was once the CTO at a few different massive industrial corporations. He was CTO at ABB, an influence and automation firm in Switzerland. And he was additionally CTO at Schneider Electrical, an influence and automation firm primarily based in France.
In these roles, he noticed that giant industrial corporations have numerous massive property. The property could be transformers, robots or change gears. And these property are there for a very long time.
“What you try to do is to see to see when that asset fails. Say a million dollar transformer fails, and when it does, you lose power and that’s bad for the environment and customers. So what you try to do is put sensors on these assets to see if my transformer working or not,” he stated. “And so before the transformer fails, it starts giving signals. So just like the human body, we have the normal things like our temperature. But before we fall sick, the temperature goes to 99. 100, 101 and then you get the fever and then it’s really pulsing. So before you really fall sick, you start giving signals. The same analogy works for digital twins.”
Lowering the price of failure
A digital wind tunnel used to assist design a race automobile.
He added, “So you put sensors, collect data and before that asset fails, it starts giving different signals. So if you monitor the changes, you can predict that it’s going to fail. This is how when I was at ABB and Schneider Electric and again all the other companies like Caterpillar or GE and everybody, all these companies, they use digital twins using data analytics. So if they pull the data and they look at here’s the normal behavior and notice the abnormal behavior. And then based on the abnormal behavior, you see it’s going to fail.”
He continued, “Now, what I found out when I was at ABB and Schneider is the accuracy of that prediction is based on pure data analytics at about 70%. And you say, oh, 70% is pretty good. Well, if you have a million-dollar part and you are 70% accurate, that means you made a 30% error. So you made an error to replace a part with a 30% probability. You just made a $300,000 mistake. You made a decision which was wrong because your accuracy was only 70%. So this was the problem I was facing when I was at Ansys.”
Banerjee stated he all the time knew that if you happen to might tie that to physics-based simulation, the accuracy would go up.
“I joined Ansys about six, seven years ago and I told my CEO, I said, this is the problem that we need to solve. If you could solve it through physics-based simulation, that would be absolutely amazing. So physics-based simulation says, “Here is a transformer, here is a robot, here is whatever, right? And you go back to the basic physics. This is how the transformer works, right? It is electrical, it signals going through the coils and is generating this and if there is a cut in the coil, right, those electrical signals, the mechanical signals will not come. That’s why the failure happens. Let’s go back to the first principles of the physics. So at Ansys, we did physics-based digital twins and simulation. The accuracy went from 70% to 90%.”
He stated, “You say, ‘Wow, 90% is great.’ But with that million-dollar part and 90% accuracy, you’re still making a $100,000 mistake. So then we said, what if you could combine the two? Combine the data analytics-based digital twins with the physics, and that is what we did called fusion technology, or a hybrid digital twin, which is now called a product called Twin AI.”
“The accuracy of that combination is 99%. So on that million-dollar part, I will only make a $1,000 mistake. So our customers are super excited,” he stated.
“At CES, I talked to many customers about our Twin AI technology, digital twin technology that works at the system level. We could build a digital twin of an entire car or a subsystem. You can take an EV car, break it down into different components of power electronics — the battery the drive train or inside the battery. We can keep going down and down now and build digital twins of the system, the subsystem, the components. But at every level, if there are sensors, we can actually build this fusion-based digital twin, this sort of hybrid digital twin. That is an absolutely amazing technology, and this is something I’ve been proud of.”
The intersection of simulation, recreation worlds and the actual world
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 simulates the African savannah as a result of it will probably.
I famous how there’s an intersection of simulated worlds and recreation worlds and the actual world with merchandise like the sport, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. The 2024 recreation had 4,000 occasions extra element on the bottom than the 2020 model. It enabled them to do wonderful simulations like utilizing a helicopter to herd a flock of sheep on the bottom.
They added gliders to the sport and that meant you could possibly land anyplace, so that they wanted well-simulated locations the place you could possibly land nearly anyplace on the planet. They enlisted plane producers to offer them CAD fashions of the designs for plane within the recreation, and so they pulled digital camera video footage from the planes after they flew over elements of the planet. My query was whether or not we’d ever get to one-to-one accuracy between simulation and actuality.
“So that’s a great question. So let me take a step back and give you the approach to simulation that we use. In our world of computer-aided engineering simulation, CAE simulation, we take the world around us which is governed by the laws of physics. Physics doesn’t lie, right? When in the world of fluids, there’s an equation called Navier Stokes equation. These are second order partial differential equations. That is the equation that is the way nature works. So we take those equations, and we solve them numerically.”
He added, “Now when you solve it numerically you can take a particular type. You can break it up into four quadrants or more. Four or 16 or 32. The more elements I have, the more accuracy I get.”
And he stated, “The trouble is, as you add more elements, more accuracy, your runtime goes out the window. Because runtime is sort of N cubed, right? So the number of elements, it’s N cubed. So this has been the challenge in our industry. With CAE simulation, you can absolutely get more accuracy, but your runtime increases. So how do you get more accuracy faster?”
Know-how pillars
Ansys at CES 2025.
As CTO at Ansys, Banerjee has a number of expertise pillars. There are superior numerical strategies the place you’re taking a look at simply the algorithm itself on a single processor, making it go sooner, extra correct, and so forth. The second factor is utilizing HPC, high-performance computing.
“You have a thousand hours of work to do. I have a hundred processors, and I’ll give them to you to run much faster just by adding parallelism to it,” he stated. “That’s why GPUs come in the partnership with Nvidia, helping us to take a fixed amount of work using GPUs to make it run much faster right with the same accuracy.”
The third focus is AI, the place the corporate is coaching these its 4 core simulators. As soon as educated, the AI mannequin runs 100 occasions sooner.
“On this planet of digital twins, we’ve got really taken all these applied sciences, GPU, HPC expertise and AI expertise, and we name that decreased order fashions, ROMs, and it’s due to Ansys’ main place within the space of decreased order fashions and AI price simulation.
The simulation market
Simulations can cut back the dangers of upkeep failures.
The simulation market is round $10 billion immediately and it’s rising round 12% a 12 months.
For those who have a look at the complete R&D price range throughout all industries on the earth, it’s about $1.2 trillion {dollars}, Banerjee stated. Within the automotive trade, the R&D is about $250 billion. About 75% of that price is banging up automobiles in “physical validation” of the automobiles. It’s bodily prototyping, he stated.
“What we believe is that the simulation becomes so accurate and so fast that companies will stop doing physical programming,” Banerjee stated. “In fact, the CEO of GM has said that by 2035, GM will stop doing physical programming if everything will be virtual. So simulation is growing at 12% today. But once those use cases come in, there will be a hockey stick event.”
The complexity of chip design and the approaching of methods design
The simulation of a again of a automobile.
Banerjee famous that one motive that Synopsys is buying Ansys for $35 billion in money and inventory is that the world is shifting from chips to methods relating to design.
“You have electronic chips that were designed with tools from Cadence and Synopsys and Mentor Graphics, but they’re only building the chip inside a system. So it’s going inside a car, right? But now you are going from chips to systems and the opportunity for simulation to design these really complicated chips to systems is enormous. It’s powered by GPUs, powered by the Omniverse, powered by AI. I am very excited about the future of simulation and synthesis for the vision of chips to systems across industries like automotive, aerospace, energy, high tech and healthcare. These are the five verticals that I we look at in terms of the opportunity to move from chips to systems.”
Banerjee has labored within the digital design automation (EDA, or utilizing software program to automate chip design) for greater than 20 years. He spent his first 20 years in academia, constructing EDA instruments. Forty years in the past, he needed to train VLSI design by drawing rectangles on the display screen, which is now referred to as Customized IC. Then the entire design trade moved. Chips had maybe 10,000 transistors, which was fairly laborious for engineers to course of. Then every progressive enchancment, from customary cells to Synopsys’ synthesis, the extent of complexity of the designs improved. Now chip designers can create 200-billion transistor chips.
“My projection is that we could do a similar thing with synthesis tools for systems. Can you have a synthesis tool for a system as complicated as an automobile or an airplane? Today, it is done. You look at a specification and a human designer goes and does the CAD of the airplane engine,” he stated.
He added, “I am saying at some point in the future you will not have to do the CAD. It will be synthesized, right? Just like we use synthesis tools for chip design, there will be system level synthesis tools. Now this is like I’m talking five to ten years out. We have got things going on at Ansys, but that’s the opportunity. Once that happens, the design of the systems will be accelerated by many factors.” So you could possibly do a factor like a 200 billion transistor chip, proper? It’s one thing rather more difficult than what you are able to do. And because the automotive corporations are struggling to scale back that design time from 4 years to 2 years to no matter, might you think about a brand new automobile design popping out in a matter of a month? Yeah. that may be enabled by synthesis.”
Simulating the human physique
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I requested Banerjee what was essentially the most difficult design potential. Is it the human mind? The human coronary heart?
“I’m glad you mentioned the human heart. I will tell you, at Ansys, I am really passionate about the healthcare area and we in the CTO office are working on simulating the human body, the heart, the brain, the lungs and so on,” her stated. “That is just such a complicated thing that we live and breathe every day. Simulation of a human body accurately will enable us to come up with solutions to heart disease. When you have arrhythmia, you have irregular heartbeat. That can be treated through either you take a drug, AstraZeneca, and it will treat your [condition]. Or you take a pacemaker from Medtronic and that will take it. Or you do more jogging, right? Changing your behavior.”
He stated, “Each of these things. or you can do actually an operation, right? You go in and you insert a stent. We are imagining a future where each of these things can be simulated. Here is this cardiovascular drug. If I take that medication, will it interact with the molecules in the human body? If I put a stent in, what is going to happen? So imagine in the future you will not require what is called clinical trials. Everything will be done through simulation of a human body, right? Virtual humans. And that will accelerate the use of the discovery of drugs and discovery of medical devices.”
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