For quite a few years, John Cooley has hosted the Troublemaker Panel at DAC. The event consists of a panel of senior executives from the EDA industry. John Cooley asks his readers for “edgy” questions to ask the panelists and on event day, he does just that. Those with complete responses that are backed with real data from real customers… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Industry’s First Certified Automotive Grade PUF for Software Defined Vehicles
Software defined vehicles (SDVs) are transforming the automotive industry. Today’s vehicles are connected computing platforms that rely on advanced processors, artificial intelligence (AI), over the air (OTA) software updates, cloud services, and vehicle to everything (V2X) communications. Every electronic … Read More
Formal Acceleration on FPGA. Innovation in Verification
Extending hardware acceleration to formal verification is a powerful idea to extend hardware acceleration to a verification domain that has not got much attention for acceleration. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford,… Read More
ASIC-to-FPGA Turnkey Prototyping Bundle: A Practical Path to Earlier Hardware Validation
For ASIC design teams, the gap between RTL simulation and first silicon remains one of the most consequential stages of the development cycle. Simulation provides controllability and visibility, but it cannot always reproduce the software workloads, interface behavior, clock interactions, and sustained system activity… Read More
How early symmetry validation eliminates costly late-stage respins
By Mauli Shah, Product Engineer, Siemens
Analog and mixed-signal design teams face a persistent challenge that directly impacts tape-out schedules and project predictability: symmetry violations discovered at signoff trigger expensive respins, delay schedules and create unpredictable iteration cycles. Despite symmetry… Read More
Rethinking Formal Verification in the AI Era
By Kanav Arora, ML Researcher at ChipAgents
Most hardware teams already understand why formal verification matters. It can expose corner cases that simulation may never reach and establish critical behaviors across the modeled state space.
The unresolved question is not whether formal works. It is why formal remains a specialist… Read More
CEO Interview with Ann Wu and Akash Levy of Silimate
Ann Wu is Co-founder & CEO of Silimate. Before Silimate, Ann designed several generations of custom silicon at Apple, helped manage inference ASIC programs at Meta, and led product strategy and execution at Celestial AI. Ann has a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering… Read More
From Process Learning to Production Control: Characterization for the Era of Heterogeneous Systems
Every generation of semiconductor innovation has relied on one fundamental principle: before a technology can be manufactured at scale, it must first be understood. That understanding comes through characterization.
For decades, characterization enabled process learning. It helped engineers understand transistor behavior,… Read More
CEO Interview with Ohad Agami of Hiveware
Ohad Agami is the co-founder and CEO of Hiveware, a semiconductor verification company he started in Tel Aviv in 2023 with CTO Yaniv Pascal. He has a systems-focused engineering background with deep experience in semiconductor architectures and complex verification flows, built at the AI chip company Hailo and earlier in Israel’s… Read More
Agentrys Designs a Real Chip with its Multi-Agent Workforce
The face of EDA is changing. For forty years, this industry has focused on optimizing algorithms for design, verification and implementation of chips. That work has delivered some ground-breaking innovations. Logic synthesis is a good example. There are so many more. Thanks to the innovations commonly referred to as Frontier… Read More


From Photonics Precision to Repeatable Evidence