Silicon Catalyst is an organization that supports early-stage semiconductor startups with an ecosystem that provides tools and resources needed to design, create, and market semiconductor solutions. It is the only incubator + accelerator focused on the Global Semiconductor Industry and operates with the motto “It’s about… Read More
Artificial Intelligence
Siemens Fleshes out More of their AI in Verification Story
While Cadence and Synopsys were sharing a lot of detail over the past few years about what they were doing in AI, Siemens EDA seemed content to offer a very general picture about their intentions without getting into a lot of detail. At DVCon 2025 they finally pulled back the curtain. Why wait until now to announce?
Darron May (Director… Read More
DVCon 2025: AI and the Future of Verification Take Center Stage
The 2025 Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) was a four-day event packed with insightful discussions, cutting-edge technology showcases, and thought-provoking debates. The conference agenda included a rich mix of tutorial sessions, a keynote presentation, a panel discussion, and an exhibit hall with Electronic… Read More
AlphaDesign AI Experts Wade into Design and Verification
I mentioned in an earlier blog that multiple presentations at DVCon 2025 went all-in on AI-assisted design and verification. The presentation was one such example, looking very much at top-down AI-expert application of agentic flows to design and verification. AlphaDesign is a new startup out of UC Santa Barbara headed by William… Read More
An Imaginative Approach to AI-based Design
DVCon 2025 was unquestionably a forum for pulling out all the stops in AI-based (RTL) design and verification, particularly around generative AI and agentic methods. I heard three product pitches and a keynote and have been told that every AI talk was standing room only. A pitch from Rise-DA particularly appealed to me because … Read More
Powering the Future: How Engineered Substrates and Material Innovation Drive the Semiconductor Revolution
Engineered substrate technology is driving an evolution within the semiconductor industry. As Moore’s Law reaches its limits, the focus is shifting from traditional planar wafer scaling to innovative material engineering and 3D integration. Companies like Soitec, Intel and Samsung are pioneering this transition, unlocking… Read More
The Double-Edged Sword of AI Processors: Batch Sizes, Token Rates, and the Hardware Hurdles in Large Language Model Processing
Unlike traditional software programming, AI software modeling represents a transformative paradigm shift, reshaping methodologies, redefining execution processes, and driving significant advancements in AI processors requirements.
Software Programming versus AI Modeling: A Fundamental Paradigm Shift
Traditional… Read More
How Synopsys Enables Gen AI on the Edge
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have undergone incredible changes over the past decade or so. We’ve witnessed the rise of convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. More recently, the rise of generative AI and transformers. At every step, accuracy has been improved as depicted in the graphic… Read More
Harnessing Modular Vector Processing for Scalable, Power-Efficient AI Acceleration
The dominance of GPUs in AI workloads has long been driven by their ability to handle massive parallelism, but this advantage comes at the cost of high-power consumption and architectural rigidity. A new approach, leveraging a chiplet-based RISC-V vector processor, offers an alternative that balances performance, efficiency,… Read More
CEO Interview with Dr. William Wang of Alpha Design AI
William Wang is the CEO and founder of Alpha Design AI, a generative AI startup transforming chip design and verification through ChipAgents, an agentic AI development tool for RTL and verification engineers. ChipAgents accelerates design, debugging, and verification of hardware description languages (HDL), integrating… Read More
Unlocking the cloud: A new era for post-tapeout flow for semiconductor manufacturing