The semiconductor industry crossed $1 trillion in annual revenue this year, almost four years ahead of earlier projections. SEMI President and CEO Ajit Manocha opened the CEO Summit at SEMICON West with a chart that told the story. A year ago, the forecast for 2030 was $1 trillion. Now it is $2 trillion, with $3 trillion possible … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
PDF Solutions CONNECT 2026 Trip Report
On October 15–16, at the tail end of SEMICON West 2026, PDF Solutions held its 2026 CONNECT Conference at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.
PDF Solutions Vitals
Santa Clara–based PDF Solutions is a semiconductor data, analytics, and connectivity company, founded in 1991. Today, its business rests on three pillars, all … Read More
ML-Based Power Models for CPUs. Innovation in Verification
An effective learned power model for a CPU could be a significant advantage in early estimation of power performance against realistic workloads in complex architectures. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A)… Read More
ChipAgents Expands AI Across Chip Design. The Test Is Faster, Verified Results
ChipAgents is expanding its agentic AI platform across digital and analog semiconductor engineering, aiming to connect fragmented design workflows through a common system that can plan tasks, operate engineering tools and evaluate results.
The Santa Clara company says its IC-Star engine combines organizational design … Read More
Why Synopsys’ Role in AMD’s Instinct MI455X Matters for AI Infrastructure
Synopsys’ collaboration with AMD on the Instinct MI455X GPU highlights a shift in how advanced AI processors are developed. Increasing performance depends on coordinating compute dies, memory interfaces, packaging, power delivery, and software. According to Synopsys’ announcement, AMD used its design, verification, … Read More
S2C Targets Faster RISC-V Bring-Up With Prototyping and AI
S2C showcased FPGA prototyping and AI-assisted debugging at the sixth RISC-V Summit China, outlining how developers can validate complex processor designs and begin software development before first silicon. Its demonstrations connected three stages of that effort: running substantial RISC-V systems on FPGA hardware,… Read More
WEBINAR: Cut down EDA License cost by 25% with Stratos AI Nitro
Expensive EDA licenses should keep chip design moving. Yet when license activity and job queues live in separate systems, teams can struggle to understand why work is waiting, which tools are underused, and whether additional spending will solve the problem. Idle seats, checkout failures, and stalled jobs can consume budgets… Read More
Beyond the Post-Mortem: How yieldHUB Live Turns the Test Floor Into an Open Window
At SEMICON West 2026 I sat down with John O’Donnell, founder and CEO, and Gillian O’Donnell, Director of Growth, to talk about how yieldHUB Live is transforming the semiconductor test floor from a blind spot into a real-time command center.
For decades, semiconductor test floors have operated as high-stakes black… Read More
Who Gets to Move the Recipe? How Autonomous Agents Earn Decision Authority in the Fab
by Ajay Kumar Govindaram
There’s a question I’ve started asking at every agentic AI demo I sit through, and it has a clean answer in every fab on earth: who is allowed to change the recipe? In a semiconductor factory, that was settled decades ago. A person doesn’t touch a production recipe because they feel confident.… Read More
Moving Beyond AI-Assisted Design – Agentrys Shows the Way with Agentic Loop Engineering
At Hot Chips 2026, OpenAI presented Jalapeño, an inference ASIC built with AI in the design loop. As reported from the session by ServeTheHome and Tom’s Hardware, OpenAI showed measured block-level wins over a human baseline — 56% on a BF16 multiply, alongside a 10% smaller matrix-unit area — within a roughly nine-month path from… Read More


Why America’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Capacity Matters