NetApp recently hosted a webinar on Agentic AI as the future for EDA and implications for infrastructure. Good list of panelists including Mahesh Turaga (VP Cadence Cloud) with an intro preso on infrastructure and agentic AI at Cadence, then our own Dan Nenni (Mr. SemiWiki) moderating, Khaled Heloue (Fellow AMD, CAD CAD/Methodology/AI),… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Hardware is the Center of the Universe (Again)
The 40-Year Evolution of Hardware-Assisted Verification — From In-Circuit Emulation to AI-Era Full-Stack Validation
For more than a decade, Hardware-Assisted Verification platforms have been the centerpiece of the verification toolbox. Today, no serious semiconductor program reaches tapeout without emulation or FPGA-prototyping… Read More
Smarter ECOs: Inside Easy-Logic’s ASIC Optimization Engine
What is the 3nm Pessimism Wall and Why is it An Economic Crisis?
Chip design is getting more difficult as technology advances. Everyone knows that. A lot of the discussion around these issues tends to focus on the demands posed by massive AI workloads and the challenges of shifting to heterogeneous multi-die design. While these create real problems, there is an underlying effect that is making… Read More
CEO Interview with Aftkhar Aslam of yieldWerx
Aftkhar Aslam is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of yieldWerx and a semiconductor industry veteran with more than 30 years of experience spanning manufacturing, test engineering, yield management, IP strategy, and enterprise digital transformation.
Under his leadership, yieldWerx has become a trusted data and… Read More
Custom IC Design using Additive Learning
Custom IC design has demanding technical requirements to produce accurate simulation results for timing and power analysis in the shortest run times. EDA vendors have been rushing to use AI and ML technology to meet these analysis requirements. I attended a webinar from Siemens on accelerating iterative design cycles with Solido… Read More
Smarter IC Layout Parasitic Analysis
IC layout parasitics dominate the performance of custom digital, analog and mixed-signal designs, so the challenge becomes how to identify the root causes and to quantify the effects of parasitics during early design stages. The old method of iterating between layout, extraction, SPICE simulation, followed by manual debug… Read More
Accelerating Static ESD Simulation for Full-Chip and Multi-Die Designs with Synopsys PathFinder-SC
As analog and mixed-signal designs become increasingly complex, parasitic effects dominate both design time and cost, consuming 30–50% of engineers’ effort in debugging and reanalyzing circuits. Addressing these multiphysics effects requires early verification strategies and reliable simulation solutions. Modern … Read More
On the high-speed digital design frontier with Keysight’s Hee-Soo Lee
High-speed digital (HSD) design is one of the more exciting areas in EDA right now, with design practices, tools, and workflows evolving to keep pace with increasing design complexity. With the annual Chiplet Summit and DesignCon festivities right around the corner, we sat down with Keysight’s Hee-Soo Lee, HSD Segment Lead, … Read More
Bronco Debug Stress Tested Measures Up
I wrote last year about a company called Bronco, offering an agentic approach to one of the hottest areas in verification – root-cause debug. I find Bronco especially interesting because their approach to agentic is different than most. Still based on LLMs of course but emphasizing playbooks of DV wisdom for knowledge capture … Read More


An AI-Native Architecture That Eliminates GPU Inefficiencies