Timothy Regan has substantial experience in analog/ mixed signal design and its supporting EDA technologies. His career began in linear engineering at Texas Instruments.
He then worked as an applications specialist for both GE-Calma and Valid Logic Systems. After that, he spent 10 years as managing director at Design Resources Ltd, providing physical semiconductor design services and EDA consulting to a variety of customers.
He founded IN2FAB in 2000 and serves as the company’s president and CTO.
Tell us about your company
IN2FAB is a semiconductor software and engineering company specializing in the migration and retargeting of semiconductor designs between process technologies and foundries. We combine proprietary EDA software with decades of hands-on engineering experience to help customers preserve and reuse valuable silicon-proven IP rather than redesigning it from scratch. Our experience spans virtually every major foundry and many leading IDMs, with customers ranging from specialist IP companies to some of the world’s largest semiconductor businesses.
What problems are you solving?
Our customers have made substantial investments to develop silicon-proven IP across a wide range of applications. When faced with the need to move to a new process node or a new foundry, there is always a concern about how to preserve the work that was done on the prior node. Will the design work as intended on a new node or foundry, or will a redesign need to be done?
IN2FAB addresses this issue with a combination of proprietary software and deep domain expertise to successfully migrate designs and preserve the customer’s prior work. Our technology has traditionally focused on complex analog and mixed-signal designs, where preserving layout intent, matching, parasitics, and other physical design characteristics is particularly important.
Our experience is backed by a long history of delivering real silicon. Over the years, our engineering teams have helped customers around the world take hundreds of circuits through design and tapeout. That practical experience gives us a deep understanding of what is required to plan and migrate circuits to successfully deliver a manufacturable, working product.
What application areas are your strongest?
Our deepest expertise is in analog and mixed-signal design, particularly complex custom layouts where physical implementation has a direct impact on circuit performance. Over the years, we have worked on a broad range of applications including data converters, PLLs, power management, RF, sensors, memory, and other precision and high-performance circuits. We have also developed considerable expertise in custom digital and specialized circuits, giving us experience across a wide range of design styles.
One of our strengths is the breadth of technologies we have worked with. Our experience covers mature through advanced process technologies and virtually every major foundry, as well as many of the industry’s leading IDMs. This includes working with different device architectures, design rules, PDKs, database technologies, and physical design methodologies. That breadth is important because migration is rarely a simple matter of applying the same process to every design—the approach must reflect the characteristics of both the source and target technologies.
What keeps your customers up at night?
Product windows continue to shrink, and companies can’t afford to spend six to twelve months recreating layouts for a new technology. At the same time, they want to protect years of engineering investment. Analog and mixed-signal layouts represent countless hours of optimization and multiple silicon revisions, so the prospect of starting from scratch introduces unnecessary cost, schedule, and technical risk.
Another major challenge is the shortage of experienced analog and custom engineers. Companies would rather have these engineers developing new products than recreating designs that have already been proven in silicon. As process technologies become more complex, manual redesign also increases the risk of subtle implementation errors and extends verification cycles, making predictable migration increasingly difficult.
Finally, our customers are looking for flexibility and confidence. They need to migrate IP between foundries or process nodes without disrupting product roadmaps or sacrificing performance. They want a migration strategy that is predictable, minimizes engineering effort, and allows them to leverage existing silicon-proven IP rather than repeatedly reinventing it. That’s where our combination of migration technology and engineering expertise delivers real value.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
For many semiconductor companies, the traditional response to moving IP to a new process has been to redesign the circuit or simply avoid retargeting altogether. Many organizations leave valuable silicon-proven IP on older process nodes because migration is perceived as expensive, risky, and disruptive. We take a different approach. We believe the layout itself represents years of engineering knowledge and silicon validation, so preserving that investment through direct layout migration delivers significant advantages in schedule, cost, and technical risk.
Our biggest differentiator is our combination of technology and experience. IN2FAB has spent decades developing migration technology and completed migration projects for a wide range of customers. That breadth of experience allows us to tackle complex migration challenges with proven methodologies rather than relying on one-size-fits-all automation.
Another key advantage is that our migration technology complements the tools and workflows our customers already use. Instead of requiring companies to purchase and deploy expensive new EDA tool suites, our solutions integrate into existing design, verification, and signoff flows, minimizing disruption and reducing deployment costs. By combining proven software with experienced engineering services, we enable customers to migrate valuable IP faster, with less risk, while maximizing the return on decades of design investment.
What new features or technology are you working on?
Historically, our strongest focus has been complex analog and custom layout, but we’re now applying our migration technology to digital standard-cell designs, hierarchical blocks, memories, and ultimately complete SoCs. This includes developing tools that can analyze and manipulate large hierarchical designs while preserving connectivity, placement, routing, and other critical design information. The goal is to make migration practical at the SoC level rather than treating each block as an isolated engineering project.
We’re also combining emerging AI technology with our current codebase to develop advanced software that operates directly within semiconductor design environments. This gives us a strong foundation in complex codebases, design databases, EDA languages, and engineering workflows that AI must understand. Rather than simply combining a general-purpose LLM with EDA manuals, we’re developing focused AI around the actual software and engineering context, including languages such as Cadence SKILL and other EDA-specific technologies. We believe this approach can deliver highly capable AI for EDA with a dramatically smaller computational, power, and cost footprint than general-purpose AI systems, while keeping proprietary data within the customer’s environment.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Customer engagements typically start with a technical and strategic discussion around a specific migration challenge or opportunity. We work with customers to understand their existing IP, target process technology, design requirements, and business objectives, while identifying where migration can deliver the greatest value. This often involves looking at ways to preserve silicon-proven IP, reduce engineering effort, accelerate time-to-market, or enable a move to a more competitive manufacturing technology.
From there, we assess the technical complexity of the project and provide detailed schedule and pricing. Our goal is to determine how much of the existing design can be preserved and automated, where engineering intervention is required, and how the migration can reduce the cost and schedule compared with a conventional redesign. This gives customers a clear picture of both the technical approach and the potential return on their existing design investment.
Customers can then choose the model that best fits their organization. Those with in-house engineering resources can purchase licenses of our migration software and perform projects themselves, while others use our engineering team as a design service. A hybrid approach is also possible, combining our software with engineering support for more complex or time-critical projects. This flexibility allows customers to gain the benefits of our technology without having to change their existing EDA environment or build a large new internal migration capability.
You can learn more about IN2FAB’s capabilities on our website here. You can also send us a direct message to enquiries@in2fab.com to begin a discussion.
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