2025 Outlook with Uzi Baruch of proteanTecs

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company. 

I am the Chief Strategy Officer at proteanTecs where I oversee our organic and inorganic growth strategies, as well as our go-to-market. This includes collaboration with ecosystem partners, defining our business model, and creating value for our customers through a targeted product portfolio. I joined proteanTecs in 2021 and have over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, big data and software domains.

proteanTecs gives advanced electronics the ability to monitor and report on their own health and performance throughout the full lifecycle. Out technology combines on-chip monitoring with a software application stack, delivering solutions for power reduction, performance optimization, and failure prevention. We offer a multi-layered, deep data and comprehensive product suite that creates a common language, breaking down data silos along the value chain and between teams.

By integrating our novel Agents (monitoring IP) into advanced semiconductor chips, our machine learning analytics and real-time applications offer unparalleled visibility – from production to the field. These deep data insights are empowering our customers in industries such as in AI, Cloud, Automotive, Telecom and Mobile to optimize their products, increasing their reliability, reducing their power consumption, and enhancing their chip and system quality. We like to say we are enabling the digital future at scale.

What was the most exciting high point of 2024 for your company? 

It has been inspiring to see the results our customers have achieved. Earlier this year, we introduced proteanTecs AVS Pro™ as part of our power reduction solution. This application has enabled our customers to achieve significant power savings, leading to potential cost savings of up to $25M. One of our customers, a data center chipmaker achieved 12.5% power reduction, enabling them to increase server throughput. A mobile company saw 11.5% power savings, extending their product’s battery life. A cloud service provider was able to safely reduce power consumption by 14%. AVS Pro is a closed-loop application that performs functional-workload aware adaptive voltage scaling (AVS) in mission-mode, with a reliability protection layer. We like to call it a “safety net”. The incredible results we are seeing in customer chips really excite us, because power reduction is one of the most pressing issues and biggest limiters of scale. We have many more case studies like these across AI, networking, and other industries.

What are the biggest challenges you are seeing in the industry?

It is clear we are entering a new era of AI, which presents both new challenges and opportunities. AI is reshaping the world as we know it, AI models are getting smarter and taking on tasks we used to think only humans could perform. Because AI is spreading to a wider range of fields and applications, it is also driving the need for more powerful and efficient SoCs to handle intensive computational workloads. This trend is particularly evident not only in the surge of training processors, but also in the rise of edge AI and the increasing demand for specialized chips that can efficiently handle inference tasks. This meant our company had to adapt as well.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge? 

As AI continues to evolve, the demand for powerful and efficient electronics grows exponentially. At proteanTecs, we are at the forefront, working across the ecosystem to enable companies and systems to scale reliably while meeting demanding power/performance envelopes. Consider hyperscale data centers, which house thousands of servers, all working in clusters across varying workloads. Throughput and power efficiency are vital, and TOPS per Watt becomes one of the most important metrics when evaluating new technology. That’s where our power reduction solution, AVS Pro that I mentioned earlier, is crucial. AVS Pro’s closed-loop hardware-firmware application monitors actual margin-to-timing-failure at high coverage for real-time voltage scaling. It allows precise guard-band reclamation based on actual workloads, aging, temperature, noise, and IR drops to reduce power while ensuring failure prevention.

Chip failures and performance degradation can cause significant problems, especially when dealing with the real-time processing demands of AI and mission-critical applications. In such environments, the reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) of systems become paramount. Introduced this year, is a cutting-edge application designed to predict and prevent failures before they happen, redefining the future of reliability.

RTHM also offers mitigation of silent data corruption (SDC), a growing challenge in high-compute environments. SDC has become a critical concern in which undetected faults propagate and lead to significant system-wide failures or computational errors, compromising data integrity. SDC is occurring at a much higher rate than software engineers expected, undermining the hardware reliability they used to take for granted. Hyperscalers, such as Google and Meta, report that approximately one in a thousand machines in their fleets is affected by SDC. RTHM enables early detection of potential failures that can lead to SDC, ensuring that systems remain resilient and reliable, even in the most demanding workloads.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2025 will be, and why?

We are seeing more companies designing their own chips. This trend is driven by the increasing requirements of software and the desire for greater control over performance, power efficiency, supply chains, and cost. By designing their own chips, companies can optimize for specific applications, differentiate their products, and reduce reliance on external suppliers. In 2025, we foresee this trend continuing to grow rapidly. Today, we are working with the leading hyperscalers, telco players, mobile companies – all designing and developing their own chips, in addition to sourcing from the traditional big semiconductor players.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth? 

Besides our offering for in-field monitoring, we also have a suite of solutions for production testing. We provide our customers with deep-data visibility to accelerate their time-to-market, enhance quality and yield, and optimize operational efficiencies. Our solutions—designed for advanced technology nodes down to 2nm—streamline the NPI process, detect latent defects, optimize performance, and enable the creation of highly customized, cutting-edge chips. With proteanTecs, customers can optimize their designs for reliability, yield, performance, and power efficiency. Our comprehensive solutions provide the monitoring IP, the EDA tools to facilitate the IP integration in the chip and ensure the implementation will provide the expected value. Once integrated we provide the ML algorithms and analytics software stack to analyze the measured data at all phases of the product cycle—from characterization, qualification, wafer testing, packaged device testing, system ramp and system test. Our solutions include edge software for inline decisions on the tester, as well as a cloud platform for advanced analytics, pinpoint debug, cross-test correlation, population analysis, and RMA investigations. Using our production analytics solutions, our customers get their products to market faster, with reduced cost, and with added confidence.

What conferences did you attend in 2024 and how was the traffic?

In 2024, proteanTecs participated in many events and conferences in the automotive, data center and semiconductor industries. These events spanned the globe—with our team participating in shows in the United States, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and India.

We participated in events similar to prior years, but also added some new ones to our calendar, especially in Japan as we expanded our strategic focus there. Of note, we kicked off 2024 with a strong presence at Automotive World in Tokyo, where we also co-hosted an Exclusive Tech Summit with Advantest with hundreds of guests, and guest speakers from Renesas and NTT.

Events with our ecosystem partners continue to be a big focus. We participated in partner events with TSMC, Intel Foundry, Samsung Foundry, Teradyne, PDF Solutions and Cadence. We also ramped up our presence at the annual Design Automation Conference (DAC). Our proteanTecs booth featured in-booth demos, along with presentations from several ecosystem partners, including TSMC, GUC, Siemens, Intel Foundry, UCIe, Teradyne and Andes Technology.

Events have clearly rebounded since COVID-19. We consistently saw strong booth traffic across our different global events. Attendees are also eager to experience, firsthand, our interactive live product demos, based on customer systems.

Will you attend conferences in 2025? Same or more?

Absolutely. In fact, our 2025 event calendar is filling up quickly. We are committed to participating in industry events and strengthening relationships through in-person connection. A big part of our strategy is centered around on-stage talks, and we plan to be many relevant venues again this year.

Throughout 2025, we look forward to collaborating across the ecosystem, presenting new solutions to technical challenges, exploring new business opportunities, and contributing to more data-driven decisions across the industry.

How do customers engage with your company?

Customers can engage with proteanTecs in a variety of ways. With a global team working across seven locations worldwide, we provide our customers with exceptional support on-site with our dedicated application engineering team, and provide them with everything they need to maximize their value from the insights they generate using our solutions.

We encourage interested parties to contact our team to book a customized product demo or ask any technical questions. They can also visit our website to explore a wide range of materials in our knowledge center, including white papers, case studies, on-demand webinars, and other informative content. Following us on social media, particularly LinkedIn, is an excellent way to stay updated on our latest news and industry insights. Last, but certainly not least, you can connect with our team at upcoming industry events and conferences.

Additional questions or final comments? 

proteanTecs celebrated its 7^th anniversary this year. It’s been an incredible journey marked by significant milestones. Throughout 2024, we introduced three new solutions—Power Reduction, RTHM™ (Real-Time Health Monitoring) and RTSM™ (Real-Time Safety Monitoring). We signed new customers across multiple industries, we also announced strategic partnerships, including a collaboration with Alphawave Semi and our participation in Arm Total Design. These achievements are a testament to the hard work and dedication of our talented team, along with the trust of our customers. Stay tuned for what we have in store during 2025, we are going to share some exciting updates soon!

Also Read:

Datacenter Chipmaker Achieves Power Reduction With proteanTecs AVS Pro

proteanTecs Introduces a Safety Monitoring Solution #61DAC

proteanTecs at the 2024 Design Automation Conference