Xinxiao Technology's distributed solution cuts chip power sign-off from weeks to days

Power sign-off is the final and most critical step in chip design, analyzing billions of nodes in the power network to test功耗, voltage drop, and electromigration. Xinxiao Technology's CEO Xie Zhuo explained that the process is equivalent to solving a sparse matrix equation with hundreds of millions of dimensions, which traditionally takes weeks. To address this, the company employs distributed matrix solving based on domain decomposition methods, splitting the huge matrix into smaller sub-matrices for parallel computing. The challenges lie in both algorithm and engineering: intelligent graph-based partitioning to minimize boundary coupling, and optimizing communication topology in the distributed solver while ensuring numerical stability. The resulting tool IcPower delivers 4.5-8.5 times speedup over foreign tools in typical test cases, and up to 10 times in dynamic analysis, reducing sign-off times from weeks to days. The company targets the domestic substitution trend in EDA, competing with established tools by offering similar pricing. IcPower is used by domestic chipmakers for CPUs, GPUs, and autonomous driving chips. In 2025, Xinxiao Technology generated revenue of several million yuan. The company plans to raise a new funding round in the second half of 2026, focusing on industry investors for market expansion. Following the trend of 3D chip stacking (as exemplified by Huawei's tau law), Xinxiao will release thermal and stress analysis products this year to support thermoelectric coupling analysis for early detection of heating issues in 3DIC designs. The company is also exploring AI agents to enable natural language-driven design tasks, aiming to build an AI-driven chip design platform integrated with other EDA tools.