Note: This Q&A interview I did with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director of marketing, product management and product engineering at Siemens EDA, in July continues my blog post series with member company executives that appears on the SEMI website.

In the span of a few short months earlier this year, Mentor Graphics became Siemens EDA and introduced a suite of integrated hardware-assisted verification tools, the first product launch under the new Siemens EDA brand.

Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director of marketing, product management and product engineering at Siemens EDA, orchestrated the launch and connected with me for a discussion about the chip design verification space. As he pointed out, verification and validation of systems is a fast-growing and important market segment to the electronic system design ecosystem.

Smith: What trends do you see in chip design? What is driving these trends?

Brunet: Chip verification costs continue to grow faster than design costs because of factors such as increasing design complexity, rising computing power, surging I/O traffic activity, increasing energy consumption and the widespread use of peripherals. These dynamics are being driven by new data center networking, communications/5G, autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and storage applications.

These trends also indicate the need for more powerful verification tools and expanded verification objectives that include power and performance analysis. Hardware-assisted verification tools are perfect for meeting these demands.

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