A couple of folks have asked me to write on nuclear power. Nuclear offers additional sources for power generation, a pressing concern thanks to demand from giant data centers. Also, investment by Microsoft, Sam Altman and others signals their urgency to accelerate past slow moving utilities plans. I have some background in this… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Nuclear Power and Design Automation
Post-Silicon Validating an MMU. Innovation in Verification
Some post-silicon bugs are unavoidable, but we’re getting better at catching them before we ship. Here we look at a method based on a bare-metal exerciser to stress-test the MMU. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A)… Read More
Trust in Verification with AI
These are stressful times in functional verification. We are being pushed to more aggressively embrace AI-based automation, knowing we will continue to be held accountable for quality of results. Verification misses could upend careers, maybe enterprises. It is tempting to believe that sanity will prevail and we will ultimately… Read More
Siemens Fuse EDA AI Agent Releases to Orchestrate Agentic Semiconductor and PCB Design
Though terminology sometimes get fuzzy, consensus holds that an agent manages a bounded task with control through a natural language interface. An agentic orchestrator, itself an agent, manages a more complex objective requiring reasoning through multi-step actions and is responsible for orchestrating those actions. By… Read More
Breker Hosts an Energetic Panel on Spec-Driven Verification
I was fortunate to be asked to moderate an evening panel adjacent to the first day of DVCon 2026, on AI-Driven SoC Verification starting from specs. You know my skepticism on panels, finding they rarely generate insights or controversy. This panel was quite different. Panelists were Shelley Henry (CEO, Moores Lab AI), Adnan Hamid… Read More
The Next Hurdle AI Systems Must Clear
AI isn’t having an easy ride. The media and Wall Street swing wildly between extremes on any hint of a shift in AI sentiment. Dickens saw this coming: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of … Read More
Siemens Reveals Agentic Questa
There’s no denying that verification now leads the field in agentic AI announcements, accelerating the trend around this significant contribution to design automation. Siemens have just announced their Questa One Agentic Toolkit, their response to this trend, building on the core Questa One platform. Questa One provides … Read More
Another Quantum Topic: Quantum Communication
In my recent series on quantum computing (QC), I intentionally overlooked a couple of adjacent topics: quantum communication and quantum sensing. These face some of the same challenges as QC, however I noticed a recent report on a test quantum network implemented by Cisco and Qunnect which led me to find more from Cisco on their … Read More
An Agentic Formal Verifier. Innovation in Verification
In a break from our academic-centric picks, here we look at an agentic verification flow developed within a semiconductor company. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our series on research ideas.… Read More
Agentic EDA Panel Review Suggests Promise and Near-Term Guidance
NetApp recently hosted a webinar on Agentic AI as the future for EDA and implications for infrastructure. Good list of panelists including Mahesh Turaga (VP Cadence Cloud) with an intro preso on infrastructure and agentic AI at Cadence, then our own Dan Nenni (Mr. SemiWiki) moderating, Khaled Heloue (Fellow AMD, CAD CAD/Methodology/AI),… Read More
Silicon Insurance: Why eFPGA is Cheaper Than a Respin — and Why It Matters in the Intel 18A Era