AI's chipmaking frontier may face patent infringement hurdles as autonomous tools take over

Put to work on different tasks, AI can do a good many specialist skills that even just a few months ago wouldn’t have been thought possible. AI is beginning to take on some of the work required to design the chips that power AI, way beyond simple optimisation. But that brings a potentially expensive problem: what happens if an AI ends up generating a design that infringes somebody else's patent, which then ends up in thousands of chips rolling off production lines? Tom's Hardware Premium spoke with experts like Domenec Forte, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida, and Simon Moore, professor of computer engineering at the University of Cambridge, to learn more about a looming issue that could broadly impact the AI chip design market.

This week, Synopsys announced a suite of AgentEngineer tools capable of carrying out long-running tasks that could verify and implement chips, as well as planning analog design and manufacturing. …