In The Arena by TechArena - AI-Driven Chip Design with Synopsys

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Allyson Klein talks with Synopsys’ Anand Thiruvengadam on how agentic AI is reshaping chip design to meet extreme performance, time-to-market, and workforce challenges.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Allison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name's Allison Klein. We are coming to you from the AI Infra Summit in Santa Clara, California, and I am really excited about this next guest. You've heard about us talk about synopsis on the program before. Anon Thera Rangdaam, Senior Director and Head of AI Product Management from Synopsis is with us. Welcome to the program, Anand. Thanks for having me. Allison, great to be here.

So Anand, you haven't been on the program before. Why don't we just start with an introduction of synopsis and what you're driving is head of AI product management? Sure. You know, this is an exciting time to be in semiconductors, Allison. Simiconductors are fueling the AI revolution that's happening all around us. It's interesting to note that AI is pushing the limits of chip design, compute, memory, interconnect. And ironically, chip design is right for disruption by AI. And that's the story, right? So what we announced earlier this week is essentially building on what we have actually

unleashed in the market over the last more than five, six years. If you notice, synopsis has pioneered the use of AI and chip design with introduction of many, many revolutionary technologies. We can talk about it for sure. This is an exciting time. And we are at the forefront of ushering in a revolution when it comes to chip design. with AI and especially Agentic AI. You announced your co-pilot capabilities to early users. Copilot is the first iteration of your long-term vision of where we're going with Generative and Agentic AI.

What do you see this doing for developers? And why is this such a big deal? Yeah, it's actually a big deal. So for us, we look at the Generative A applications in multiple value tiers. The first value tier is assistive capabilities. These are the capabilities that assist human chip engineers. as they go through the design process

for a use cases like knowledge retrieval, tools, script generation, ramping up on tool usage and so forth. I think it's a great way to slatten the learning curve for early career engineers, if you will, or even mid-level and expert engineers, because a lot of the time is spent in looking for answers. And then the next value tier is what we call us

creative capabilities. So these capabilities essentially, as the name implies, help with collateral generation, various types of collateral use and chip design. And that's essentially, you know, piggybacking on the announcement we made earlier this week, early access to customers are seeing enormous benefits, cutting down some of the cycles we are talking about from days to hours or hours to minutes. And I think that's the reason why we think it's a big deal because

it's a great way to unlock productivity and help accelerate innovation. Now, assistive, creative, that was really interesting bifurcation of capabilities. What led you to the decision that you were going to deliver under these two categories? And what has the customer response been in terms of understanding that journey with you. These capabilities form the foundation for our agent tech AI vision. And so coming back to the two tiers, the assistive and the creative capabilities, the customers actually were using this and early as customers that we talked about. They have seen enormous benefits.

We talked about a 35% boost in productivity for formal verification. One example I'll give you, which I think was something we highlighted in the news release. When we talk about the assistive capabilities, script generation, as an example. Many of the early career and mid-level engineers, mid-career engineers, they actually believe it or not, spend a lot of time writing scripts or optimizing scripts for tools for different projects.

If we can cut down on the script generation or the script writing capabilities, if you will, then that's a huge productivity boost for them. So our workflow assistant, which is part of the assistive tier, assistive capability tier, that essentially helps generate scripts. It helps optimize scripts very quickly. It helps with documentation and things like So that, I think, has significantly bent the curve in terms of productivity benefits for the engineers.

So, you know, in the press release, you mentioned 35% productivity. You mentioned that earlier, too. When you look at that productivity, one, I'm from the silicon industry, and I know that 35% productivity and engineering team is like, wow. But how does that relate to your broader vision of the generations and where do you think this is going? Yeah, 35% I agree with the incomplete. it's a big deal, especially for disciplines where expert level knowledge is required. Formal verification is a very, very niche area where there's lot of expertise is required, and they're having the capability to be able to improve productivity

with automatic generation of test benches, assertions, helper properties, to help with formal convergence, high degree of syntactic and functional correctness in these test benches, that I think we believe is going to be a game changer. And where we're going with this, like I said, is these capabilities are the foundations of our agentic vision. We rolled out our agentic vision earlier this year, and we think of the agentic world in terms of levels of autonomy, L1 through L5.

So all the capabilities we are talking about today, the system and the creative capabilities, are part of L1, the basic tier. And the next tier is where agents come in. Task level agents in L2, L3 is where multiple task level agents come together into a multi-agent workflow. L4 is where you have dynamic optimization

of these workflows as they get ex-geant. with learning and so on and so forth, this is going to be transformative. Yeah. And we are really excited about this because we are at the forefront of this, and this agentic AI for EDA, for chip design, is going to be, in our opinion, a net new design paradigm. It's going to really transform the way chip design is done, and unlock significant productivity benefits, help customers accelerate innovation, or even tackle greater complexity.

Yeah, well, that's the question that I wanted to talk to you about. We're at the AI Infra Conference. Yeah. There are tons of silicon players all around this show floor that we're on right now. What has the response been from your customer base? And where do you see it making a difference? Because they're all so challenged right now to deliver more customization, faster innovation, different types of products for different areas of that AI training inference model.

What is the response been and what do they need from you next? Yeah, the response has been very positive. And I think we share that with them because the results have been so successful, right? Most or many of our customers, and in fact, all of our customers, as you point out correctly, are challenged in terms of chip design requirements because they're getting pushed to the extremes, especially with AI. And that's also the reason why we think what we're doing is essentially the right thing, because bringing in AI to chip design will help our customers meet this requirements. Right? The extreme requirements in terms of compute, in terms of memory, in terms of interconnect, performance, power, you name it. Plus, because the AI landscape is evolving so rapidly, the development times are getting compressed quite a bit. So the time-to-market pressures have increased significantly.

So with AI, we are able to essentially address that challenge as well. And the third thing which also our customers are telling us is talent shortage. With an aging workforce or with a shortage of new talent, the productivity challenge has been excellent. exacerbated significantly. With AI, you're going to be able to address that challenge for our customers also. So, Matt, I think our customers have shared this with us, and we believe our Agentic AI vision will essentially help address these challenges. Well, I attended your Leader Summit earlier this year where your CEO laid out the vision for your Agentic AI feature. This was the first step. He promised it in fall. I think technically it's still summer. So congratulations. As a product

management lead, that's got to be a good feeling to have the product out in the marketplace. It's an exciting time. As I said, we are steadily introducing new technologies. We've talked about the expanded capabilities earlier this week. We're really excited for what's in store in the future. And we'll be happy to share the next set of innovations. That's awesome. And thank you for coming on the program.

I've got one more question for you. I'm sure that folks are listening, you're like, okay, I want to get into the early access program. Where can folks go to learn more about the solutions that you're talking about and engage with the synopsis team? Absolutely. Absolutely. So customers can simply go to synopsis.com slash AI, and we'll have a lot of resources out there. Plus, you'll also be able to reach out to our sales reps for an instant follow-up.

I can't wait to have you back on the show to learn more. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Alison. It's great talking to you. Thanks for joining Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, Techorina.com. All content is copyright by TechRena. Thank you.