The semiconductor industry is entering a period in which manufacturing leadership will depend not simply on producing more data, but on turning that data into timely, trustworthy decisions. PDF Solutions CONNECT 2026 is designed around this challenge. Taking place October 15–16 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, the… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Webinar – ChipAgents Shows You How to Break the Timing Closure Bottleneck with AI
We all know timing closure is one of the most challenging processes in chip design. Extracting actionable insight from massive timing reports, tracing violations back to RTL, and selecting the right fix across complex PPA tradeoffs all require deep expertise. And every change can trigger hours or days of tool runs and cross-team… Read More
Keysight EDA update at DAC 2026
On the last day of #DAC2026 I stopped by the Keysight booth to chat with Nilesh Kamdar, GM of EDA Business to get an update. He has spent 27 years in the industry, and this made 25 DAC trips for him. For Keysight the application areas of focus are serving designers of high frequency and high-speed digital, RF, and mm/uwave designs. An … Read More
AI Memory Gap at DAC 2026
On Tuesday at #DAC2026 I attended the exhibitor presentation, Synopsys: How Silicon Startups are Addressing the AI Memory Gap. Vikram Bhatia from Synopsys introduced the two presentations from Wenbo Yin, SVP of IC Design at TetraMem and R. Scott Hills, VP of Business Development at ANAFLASH. Datacenters consume large amounts… Read More
When Design Gets Faster, the Bottleneck Moves Through the Physical Stack
AI can compress the path to tape-out. The next challenge is compressing physical realization.
Something important is beginning to happen in semiconductor development: the design cycle itself is becoming compressible.
AI-assisted engineering can accelerate architecture exploration, RTL development, verification, physical… Read More
Podcast EP364: The Broad Impact of Advanced Mask Solutions, Today and Tomorrow with Dr. Germain Fenger
Daniel is joined by Dr. Germain Fenger, Senior Director of Product Management at Synopsys where he leads advanced mask solutions and computational lithography technologies. With a background spanning semiconductor manufacturing, lithography research, engineering, and product leadership, Germain has held roles at imec,… Read More
The $9.5 Billion Design IP Market: Shifting Boundaries, Arm’s Monopoly, and the RISC-V Response
While semiconductor design intellectual property (IP) is a $9.45 billion market, it acts as the absolute architectural bottleneck for the entire global semiconductor value chain. The choices made at the IP layer today dictate the cost, power, and security of a downstream technology economy rapidly marching toward a trillion… Read More
Technical Case Study: MicroLED Yield Management with Plessey and yieldWerx
Plessey Semiconductors manufactures monolithic MicroLED displays for near-eye augmented-reality systems, where pixel pitch, brightness, uniformity, and defect density directly determine usable yield. Its process integrates device design, epitaxy, wafer fabrication, bonding, and production in one facility. The displays… Read More
Unified Emulation and Prototyping: Pipedream or Reality?
Preamble
Hardware-assisted verification (HAV) platforms, including hardware emulators and FPGA-based prototyping systems, are the two dominant methodologies for validating long workloads on complex System-on-Chip (SoC) designs before tape-out. HAV sits within a broader continuum of verification engines: simulation… Read More
DAC 2026: A Discussion of Who Owns the Intelligence Behind Tomorrow’s Chips and How to Make it Better
The industry is moving from simple documentation chatbots to agentic workflows capable of performing complex, multi-step tasks like design creation, verification, and library characterization. These agents are intended to enhance engineering productivity by roughly 50%. A panel of industry experts met at DAC to discuss… Read More


Why ASML Is Racing to Build 110 EUV Machines