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 AI-driven automation into Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workflows. Under his leadership, Alpha Design AI has secured strategic partnerships and enterprise contracts with major semiconductor companies.

William is also the Director of the Natural Language Processing Group and Center for Responsible Machine Learning at UC Santa Barbara, where he holds the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professorship in Artificial Intelligence and Designs.

He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2018), IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch (2020), NSF CAREER Award (2021), British Computer Society Karen Spärck Jones Award (2022), the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award (2023), and IEEE SPS Laplace Award (2024). His research has been supported by major tech companies, securing large contracts and gifts from all major big tech companies around the world.

William completed his PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and has published ~250 papers in AI, machine learning, and NLP. His insights and research have been featured in Wired, VICE, Scientific American, Fortune, Fast Company, NASDAQ, The Next Web, Law.com, and Mental Floss.

Tell us about your company?

We are building the next generation of Agentic AI EDA tools for chip design and verification. Our flagship product, ChipAgents, is a suite of intelligent AI agents designed to enhance the productivity of hardware engineers working with HDL (Hardware Description Languages) like Verilog and SystemVerilog. We leverage generative AI and agentic workflows to accelerate debugging, verification, and design iteration, ultimately reducing time-to-market for semiconductor companies.

AI is transforming EDA workflows faster than ever, and we are at the forefront of this shift. AI agents will be able to empower engineers to significantly improve their productivity for complex designs. For example, for a DDR5 project, instead of four engineers working for a whole year, it will be 2 months with the help of ChipAgents.

We’ve been laser-focused on making AI truly useful in EDA by integrating the best agentic AI solutions with industry-standard tools, and addressing real engineering pain points. Since launching ChipAgents, we’ve successfully deployed it to leading semiconductor companies, startups, and AI accelerator firms to refine and deploy our technology. Our technology is being used by semiconductor leaders responsible for billions of chips shipped worldwide.

With ChipAgents, I’m bringing THE best AI to EDA, leveraging my experience in agentic AI automation to transform RTL design, verification, and debugging with agentic workflows and deep integration with industry standard tools. Our goal is to redefine chip development, making it faster, smarter, and more efficient with AI.

What problems are you solving?

Chip design and verification are some of the most expensive and time-consuming aspects of semiconductor development. Verification alone can consume over 80% of the total design cycle, and debugging RTL code is an arduous process that hasn’t seen much innovation in decades.

We’re solving three key pain points:

1. Reducing Debug Time: Engineers spend countless hours troubleshooting RTL and testbenches. Our solution helps users understand their design requirements, the RTL code, testbenches, and accelerates bug resolution by working with ChipAgents and automating tedious tasks.
2. Improving Verification Efficiency: Traditional verification relies on manual testbench creation and constraint tuning. ChipAgents can generate, optimize, and validate testbenches, boosting functional coverage.
3. Enhancing Productivity with AI-Driven Insights: Unlike generic coding assistants, ChipAgents understands semiconductor-specific workflows, integrating deeply with EDA tools to provide actionable insights rather than generic code completions.

What application areas are your strongest?

Our strongest application areas include:

• RTL Design & Debugging – Helping both ASIC and FPGA engineers write, optimize, and debug Verilog/SystemVerilog more efficiently.
• Functional Verification – Automating UVM testbench generation and improving coverage.
• EDA Tool Scripting – Assisting with tool automation for top vendors, and other industry platforms.
  AI-Accelerated Semiconductor Design – Exploring new workflows for AI-assisted chip development, including PPA (Power, Performance, Area) optimization.

Our early adopters include teams designing AI accelerators, custom ASICs, RISC-V processors, and memory chips—all areas where reducing verification cycles and debugging complexity translates directly to faster time-to-market.

What keeps your customers up at night?

A few key challenges dominate our customers’ minds:

• Verification bottlenecks – Engineers struggle to hit coverage goals without significantly extending design schedules.
• Time-to-market pressure – AI, automotive, and HPC chip companies are in an arms race; delays mean losing competitive advantage.
• Tool complexity – EDA tools are incredibly powerful but often require deep expertise and cumbersome scripting to maximize their value.
• AI and automation skepticism – Many engineers are skeptical about how well AI can integrate into their existing workflow without disrupting their rigorous design methodologies.

We designed ChipAgents to address these concerns head-on by providing practical human-in-the-loop solutions without disrupting proven verification methodologies, and our fully agentic AI solutions will demonstrate the promise of this technology.

What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?

The EDA space is dominated by Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens, which provide powerful but complex toolchains. Several AI startups are trying to introduce LLMs for hardware development, but most are either too general-purpose or lack deep integration with industry tools.

We differentiate in three ways:

1. Deep Technical Expertise in AI – We started training the first neural language model back in 2011 (Yes, even before ImageNet), and the team has 15 years of experience in training and working with language models: this is the absolute unique differentiator in the market.
2. Purpose-Built for EDA, Seamless Integration – ChipAgents is optimized specifically on chip design and verification workflows, unlike generic AI coding assistants. We work within engineers’ existing tools rather than forcing them to switch platforms.
3. Agentic Workflows – Beyond just providing suggestions, ChipAgents can take actions, such as running simulations, modifying testbenches, and optimizing assertions.

For now, we’re not trying to replace existing EDA tools—we’re augmenting them with AI to make engineers exponentially more productive. This paved the way for future fully agentic solutions.

What new features/technology are you working on?

We’re continuously enhancing ChipAgents with AI-driven innovations focused on improving design, verification, and optimization workflows. Our upcoming advancements include:

• Intelligent Debugging Support – AI-powered assistance to streamline troubleshooting and accelerate issue resolution in complex designs.
• Automated Verification Optimization – AI-driven enhancements that adapt to engineering workflows, improving functional coverage and verification efficiency.
• AI-Guided Design Insights – Advanced analysis tools that provide engineers with real-time feedback on design modifications, including key performance trade-offs.

Our vision is to establish AI as a trusted co-engineer, enabling hardware designers to focus on high-value problem-solving while reducing the burden of manual debugging and verification.

How do customers normally engage with your company?

We offer three ways for customers to engage:

1. Pilot Programs & Trials – Customers can deploy ChipAgents on a pilot to evaluate its impact on their design and verification workflow.
2. Enterprise Licensing – We provide flexible licensing options for startups, mid-market, and large semiconductor firms, with dedicated onboarding and support.
3. Strategic Collaborations – We work closely with select big tech that pushes the boundaries of automation in chip design.

Our early traction has been strong, and we’re expanding collaborations with semiconductor leaders, companies, and EDA innovators who see AI as the future of hardware design. Feel free to reach out to us at chipagents.ai and Book a Demo with us.

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