I mentioned in an earlier blog that multiple presentations at DVCon 2025 went all-in on AI-assisted design and verification. The presentation was one such example, looking very much at top-down AI-expert application of agentic flows to design and verification. AlphaDesign is a new startup out of UC Santa Barbara headed by William… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
An Imaginative Approach to AI-based Design
DVCon 2025 was unquestionably a forum for pulling out all the stops in AI-based (RTL) design and verification, particularly around generative AI and agentic methods. I heard three product pitches and a keynote and have been told that every AI talk was standing room only. A pitch from Rise-DA particularly appealed to me because … Read More
Unlocking the cloud: A new era for post-tapeout flow for semiconductor manufacturing
As semiconductor chips shrink and design complexity skyrockets, managing post-tapeout flow (PTOF) jobs has become one of the most compute-intensive tasks in manufacturing. Advanced computational lithography demands an enormous amount of computing power, putting traditional in-house resources to the test. Enter the … Read More
SemiWiki Outlook 2025 with yieldHUB Founder & CEO John O’Donnell
What was the most exciting high point of 2024 for your company?
One of the most exciting milestones in 2024 was the further expansion of our data science team, which allowed us to take a bold step toward fully integrating AI into our solutions. This not only is enhancing our offerings but also helped us grow within our existing customer… Read More
TRNG for Automotive achieves ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434 compliance
The security of a device or system depends mainly on being unable to infer or guess an alphanumeric code needed to gain access to it or its data, be that a password or an encryption key. In automotive applications, the security requirement goes one step further – an attacker may not gain access per se, but if they can compromise vehicle… Read More
Bug Hunting in Multi Core Processors. Innovation in Verification
What’s new in debugging multi-/many-core systems? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Post-Silicon… Read More
Synopsys Expands Hardware-Assisted Verification Portfolio to Address Growing Chip Complexity
Last week, Synopsys announced an expansion of their Hardware-Assisted Verification (HAV) portfolio to accelerate semiconductor design innovations. These advancements are designed to meet the increasing demands of semiconductor complexity, enabling faster and more efficient verification across software and hardware… Read More
How Synopsys Enables Gen AI on the Edge
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have undergone incredible changes over the past decade or so. We’ve witnessed the rise of convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. More recently, the rise of generative AI and transformers. At every step, accuracy has been improved as depicted in the graphic… Read More
CEO Interview with Dr. William Wang of Alpha Design AI
William Wang is the CEO and founder of Alpha Design AI, a generative AI startup transforming chip design and verification through ChipAgents, an agentic AI development tool for RTL and verification engineers. ChipAgents accelerates design, debugging, and verification of hardware description languages (HDL), integrating… Read More
Webinar: RF design success hinges on enhanced models and accurate simulation
Traditional RF board design strategies based on circuit simulation worked at lower frequencies and relatively large spacing between components. Higher frequencies and densification dominate RF designs now, where corresponding wider bandwidths and tighter layouts with closely spaced components produce more complex 3D… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot