SANTA CLARA, California, March 20 (Reuters) - Synopsys ( SNPS )

on Wednesday showed a set of software tools designed to make it

easier and faster to design cars, data centers and other big

systems that rely on semiconductors.

Synopsys ( SNPS ) is one of the major players in making software for

designing the chips themselves, helping companies like Nvidia ( NVDA )

decide how to arrange hundreds of billions of

transistors on small squares of silicon.

But with its $35 billion offer to buy engineering software

firm Ansys ( ANSS ), Synopsys ( SNPS ) aims to also help customers design

the products and systems where those chips will ultimately end

up. At its annual developer conference in Santa Clara,

California on Wednesday, Synopsys ( SNPS ) Chief Executive Sassine Ghazi

outlined how some customers are doing that.

Tesla, for example, uses a virtual simulation of a

custom chip to start writing the software for that chip and

testing how the software will control its cars long before any

physical item has been manufactured. In an interview, Sassine

said other automotive customers will follow suit, though he

declined to name them.

"Tesla was a pioneer in looking at the car as a

software-defined vehicle," Ghazi told Reuters. "There are a

number of European and Japanese OEMs that are going down that

path, and the Chinese are racing toward it as well."

Synopsys ( SNPS ) also outlined how the operators of huge data

centers that power artificial intelligence systems such as

copilots or chatbots can simulate how that software will run

across tens of thousands of chips - and how much heat the chips

will give off during that process, which then helps determine

how much cooling equipment will be needed.

"The speed at which AI models can evolve and produce

outcomes is limited by how quickly we can evolve the

supercomputing architecture and the hardware to meet this new

challenge," Reynold D'Sa, corporate vice president of silicon,

cloud hardware and infrastructure at Microsoft ( MSFT ) said in

a statement.