Synopsys, Amazon Web Services sign chip design licensing deal worth more than $1 billion

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Synopsys SNPS.O and Amazon Web Services on Wednesday said that Amazon.com's AMZN.O cloud computing unit has entered a multi-year deal worth more than $1 billion to license chip design intellectual property from Synopsys.

Synopsys makes software for designing complex computer chips, helping firms such as Nvidia NVDA.O and Intel INTC.O decide how to lay out tens of billions of transistors on a few square millimeters of silicon. But it also increasingly licenses blueprints for parts of a chip, a business that brought in $1.75 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year and where it competes against Arm Holdings O9Ty.F.

In its early stages, the Synopsys design licensing business focused on common parts of chips where customers found it more cost-effective to license blueprints from Synopsys than to design those parts from scratch. But Synopsys has moved into more complex designs such as computing cores and said the deal on Wednesday will focus on blueprints optimized for specific types of chips.

AWS designs a variety of its own chips, including its Graviton central processors and its Trainium AI chips. The two parties did not specify which AWS chips will use Synopsys blueprints.

As part of the deal, Synopsys will also adopt AWS computing and storage services, as well as Amazon Bedrock to build and deploy AI applications.