Agentic AI was everywhere at DAC 2026. Various focus areas were presented that covered many parts of the chip design flow. Verification and debug were a popular topic since so much time is spent there. Analog design is another pressure point. Every chip design has analog content. While the size of the analog blocks may not be huge,… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Exploiting agentic automation cost-effectively. Innovation in Verification
Frontier models (Claude, etc.) are very powerful but becoming expensive for high token counts. Methods to exploit a mix of models, including local open-weight models, are attracting attention. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer… Read More
Will Agentic AI Help the Open-Source EDA Market?
Agentic artificial intelligence is likely to give the open-source electronic design automation market a meaningful boost. Its biggest contribution will not be the immediate replacement of established commercial platforms from Cadence, Synopsys, or Siemens. Instead, agentic AI can make open-source tools easier to use, … Read More
The End of “Good Enough” Timing Analysis
Why Advanced-Node Clock Networks Need More Than Timing Closure
Timing closure has been one of the semiconductor industry’s most reliable measures of design readiness for decades. Static timing analysis (STA) is a critical enabler for this process. It allows analysis of enormous designs across millions of paths, multiple… Read More
Bronco AI at DAC 2026, What a Difference a Year Makes
During my time at DAC 2026 I felt like I was attending two events. One was the traditional DAC where approaches to designing complex chips using the best tools and methodologies were the focus. There was another focus for the conference. This one was like the traditional DAC with an important difference. Here, the discussion centered… Read More
Synopsys Wins the AI Silicon Brain Drain
The reported move of Amit Gupta, Jeff Dyck, and Ryan Silk from Siemens EDA to Synopsys matters because this is more than a routine transfer of experienced executives and engineers. Together, the three represent a concentrated body of expertise in applying artificial intelligence to semiconductor design—one of the most strategically… Read More
Webinar: Warpage has a Timing Problem
In advanced packaging, warpage is rarely a modeling problem. It is a timing problem.
JOHN BRUGGEMAN
By the time many advanced packages undergo high-fidelity thermo-mechanical analysis, a long chain of decisions has already been made. Stackup. Materials. Die placement. Package architecture. Each decision constrains the … Read More
Optimizing for Thermoelastic in Package and PCB Design from the Outset
Signoff-quality design tools are mandatory for signoff, though not so good for early design exploration. Signoff demands high accuracy in design description and high precision in analysis. The first requirement can’t be met early in design where architecture decisions are still in flux, and the second depends on very detailed… Read More
Avestra: Agentic AI for SystemVerilog Assertion Generation
Modern ASIC, SoC, CPU, and GPU development depends on verification processes that detect subtle functional defects before tapeout. SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) are particularly important because they encode temporal design intent: how signals, states, and transactions must behave across clock cycles. Unlike conventional… Read More
Synopsys Cloud at DAC 2026
Cloud-based EDA has been around for awhile now, so at #DAC2026 I met with Vikram Bhatia, Executive Director of Synopsys Cloud to see what’s new with their offering. His background includes stints at Sun, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle and NetApp. The Synopsys Cloud FlexEDA lets designs teams run their EDA solutions inside of a web browser,… Read More


The $9.5 Billion Design IP Market: Shifting Boundaries, Arm’s Monopoly, and the RISC-V Response