EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2025 – Verific

By, Michiel Ligthart, COO, Verific Design Automation

Michiel Ligthart

2025 Promises Innovation and Vibrancy for EDA

2025 will see a continuation of two trends. Bespoke electronic design automation (EDA) where larger semiconductor companies and system companies started to develop in-house EDA tools is the first.

The second is the emergence of well-funded EDA startups offering a variety of generative AI (GenAI) solutions, technologies and methodologies destined to change the way chip design and verification is done.

Bespoke EDA brings the EDA industry full circle. Even though semiconductor companies and system companies license most of their design tools from EDA companies, they now develop their own design flow for certain design areas. They write their own internal EDA tools specific to their requirements only and don’t go outside of the company. This is reminiscent of another time when semiconductor companies wrote their own software tools to design semiconductors. Eventually, EDA startups took on singular problems including simulation, place and route, logic synthesis and started replacing in-house developed tools.

The first four GenAI EDA startups that appeared last year have lofty goals all in the name of creating an engineering environment that will help engineers to do their work better and more efficiently. They are applying GenAI technology to augment the capabilities of existing tools, eliminating error-prone, repetitive tasks for efficient and more productive chip design and verification while speeding time to market. One is building a co-pilot. Others have GenAI-based design environments to do optimizations to tackle certain aspects of the semiconductor design cycle for fast, accurate large language model (LLM) development, functional verification, chip design and embedded code development.

And that’s just for starters. All have founders who were previously at companies like Apple, Nvidia and SpaceX with personal experience as chip designers dealing with repeated bottlenecks and other frustrations. Consequently, each startup has the chance to develop the right environment using GenAI capabilities to explore different design alternatives. They are wisely leveraging relationships with well-established point tool EDA companies that have proven track records for quality and customer support, saving years of development time.

Between bespoke and GenAI EDA, 2025 promises innovation and vibrancy for EDA. Innovation is back and EDA is hotter than ever. It will get hotter in 2025, a result of the two new market segments driven by talented people about to change the entire makeup of the semiconductor industry. Join me in a front row seat to watch their success.

About Michiel Ligthart

Michiel Ligthart, COO of Verific Design Automation, has an extensive background in engineering, product marketing and general management.

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Category: EDA Predictions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025 at 12:21 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.