Former designers turned entrepreneurs say existing EDA solutions are outdated.

By Ann Wu, co-founder and CEO, Silimate, and Rick Carlson, vice president of sales, Verific Design Automation

AI has entered the realm of electronic design automation (EDA) and is already reshaping the landscape with new tools that enable faster delivery of chips and IP to market.

And with it, the venture community is funding entrepreneurial startups in the nascent market segment, sometimes referred to as AI EDA, which has been lacking for some time.

Much of the AI implementation activity is coming from actual hardware designers-turned-entrepreneurs who worked at companies like Apple and SpaceX. They were frustrated in their previous roles with the existing chip design process and sought to address its inadequacies.

Their well-funded companies are announcing new or soon-to-be-announced products based on AI technology that can address some of the more pressing challenges, promising improvements in time to tape out and expediting the chip design process.

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Ann Wu is CEO of EDA startup Silimate, developer of a co-pilot (chat-based GenAI) for chip and IP designers to find and fix functional and power, performance and area (PPA) issues in their designs. Rick Carlson is Vice President of Sales at ESD Alliance member company Verific Design Automation, provider of front-end EDA platforms to a range of small and emerging EDA companies like Silimate and larger EDA vendors.

I recently talked with Ann and Rick who represent EDA’s new and old guard. I found them to be bullish about the emerging EDA space called AI EDA that uses GenAI and large language models as the foundational tools and the swelling numbers of well-funded startups entering this space.

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Rick Carlson, Verific Design Automation’s Vice President of Sales, is an EDA trends spotter. I was reminded of his prescience when he recently called to catch up and talk about Verific’s role as provider of front-end platforms powering an emerging EDA market.

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2024 marks Verific’s 25th anniversary as a valued supplier of front-end Parser Platforms! Rob Dekker, our founder, president and CTO, and COO Michiel Ligthart talk with Bob Smith, the ESD Alliance’s Executive Director, about our evolution and the industry over the last 25 years and what’s to come.

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“While the big EDA vendors talked about using AI to tackle all the chip design complexity, it was also refreshing to see some (well-funded) startups starting to tackle EDA industry challenges using generative AI. I spoke to Rick Carlson, a veteran of the EDA industry (he told me this was his 40th year), and he suggested the emergence of these new EDA startups was an exciting new phase of the EDA industry – maybe, what I like to call it, EDA 3.0. He highlighted two of those whom I also spoke to, which were Silimate, and PrimisAI.”

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