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
Electronic Design Automation
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
Must-See DAC Panel – Build vs Buy: Who Owns the Intelligence Behind Tomorrow’s Chips?
This year, DAC will be buzzing about AI from every direction. The debate of build vs. buy will also be a popular topic. And the debate of who owns the intellectual property embodied in chip designs and how to control it will also get a significant amount of airtime. These are all interesting and compelling discussion points. It turns… Read More
BRONCO AI: WIN THE RACE TO TAPE-OUT | BOOTH 935
Bronco AI builds AI agents for chip design and verification. Our goal is to get teams from spec to RTL-freeze as fast as possible by surfacing the nastiest bugs sooner and fixing them faster.
Our agents work the way strong engineers do: they read the spec, form hypotheses, run experiments, and chase a problem until it is root-caused,… Read More
The Other Side of Bug Localization
Automated debugging – starting from an unexpected behavior to find a bug root-cause or a small set of possible root-causes – is a hot topic now that agentic systems are playing a bigger role in automation. Unsurprising since debug remains the most time and resource-consuming aspect of verification, in turn the most time/resource-consuming… Read More
Agentrys Weighs in on LLM Benchmarking for Chip Design at DAC 2026
Si2 is conducting quite a few sessions at DAC this year covering everything from power model standards to agentic AI. There is one session that is a bit different, focusing on LLM benchmarking. Since AI is popping up everywhere, the ability to accurately assess and measure the quality of new models becomes more important. That’s… Read More
CEO Interview with Dan Fritchman of Generation Alpha Transistor
Dan Fritchman is an electrical engineer and semiconductor-software entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Generation Alpha Transistor, a San Francisco startup developing AI-based tools for integrated-circuit design.
He earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2023. His dissertation,… Read More
RISC-V Advantage in Accelerator Control Highlights System Verification Challenges
When considering best-fit applications for RISC-V, the appeal of extending the instruction set and competitive pricing for storage and edge applications has been pretty clear. But I have always struggled to understand the appeal in head-on competition with Arm in premium applications such as servers and infrastructure systems.… Read More


Intel and TSMC Take Different Paths to High-NA EUV