Keynote Speakers
Ziyad Hanna, Ph.D.
Corporate VP, System Verification and AI Technology
Cadence
09:20 - 09:40
Design for AI and AI for Design - A New Era of Design Excellence
By the year 2030, the semiconductor industry is set to witness an extraordinary transformation characterized by a staggering increase in chip-design projects, estimated to be around four times more than current levels. Each of these projects will bear a complexity that is expected to be up to ten times greater, primarily driven by the need for design-specific architectures (DSA). This shift is essential to accommodate the rapidly evolving design requirements for the ‘Design for AI’ market, which is expanding at an unprecedented pace.
While the demand for chips continues to soar, the growth in human resources and skills within the industry is projected to lag significantly, with estimates of less than a 10% increase. This mismatch in supply and demand will likely lead to escalating engineering costs, creating a pressing need for innovative solutions. In this context, AI emerges as an incredibly promising alternative. By harnessing AI technologies, organizations can drastically enhance productivity, potentially increasing it by an order of magnitude. This capability will enable ‘AI for design’ solutions to effectively meet the skyrocketing demand for devices across various sectors, ensuring they remain competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.
This keynote will explore the evolution of AI in chip design, from design assistants to fully autonomous systems. Attendees will discover the growing ecosystem of AI tools and silicon agents, their integration with design datasets and EDA toolchains, and their potential to optimize workflows and drive innovation in the semiconductor industry.
BIO:
Ziyad Hanna is a distinguished global technology executive, computer scientist, and AI leader, with more than 35 years of experience shaping the fields of electronic design automation and artificial intelligence. As a Corporate Vice President of Cadence Design Systems, and R&D General Manager, leading the company’s technology innovations and global business with focus on software and AI technologies for the worldwide chip design industry.
09:40 - 10:00
Powering Intelligent General-Purpose Computing with RISC-V
Dr. Charlie Su
President and CTO
Andes Technology
LLM and other AI/ML innovations are rapidly transforming the computing landscape. Their influence now extends beyond hyperscaler datacenters into a broad spectrum of feature-rich, general-purpose applications—which we call Intelligent General Computing (IGC). This includes emerging use cases such as AI PCs, edge servers, surveillance systems, drones, ADAS, and robotics.
In this talk, we will introduce the concept of IGC and examine how the RISC-V ecosystem has evolved to meet its demands. We will highlight Andes Technology’s latest solutions, including the RVA23-capable out-of-order processors Cuzco and AX66 designed for general computing as well as the AX46MPV wide-vector processor optimized for large-scale AI/ML workloads. We will also explore Andes’ rich software stack built on top of the RISC-V ecosystem, supporting efficient development for IGC applications.
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BIO:
Dr. Charlie Su cofounded Andes in 2005. He established R&D and Technical Marketing and has been driving product planning, development, and promotion to establish Asia’s first patented licensable processor IP families AndesCore™. In 2016, Dr. Su led the team to incorporate RISC-V into Andes fifth-generation architecture AndeStar™ V5, and started a new chapter of Andes growth in existing markets such as IOT, MCU/MPU, Storage and WiFi/BT as well as new markets such as AI/ML, Automotive, and 5G.
Before Andes, Dr. Su spent over 12 years in the Silicon Valley on some state-of-the-art projects, including the Sun multi-core multi-threading Ultrasparc T1 and T2 processors, the C-Cube E-series MPEG media processors, the MIPS OOO R10K processor, and the Intergraph Clipper VLIW processor. Charlie got his Ph.D. in CS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MS in CS from the National Tsing-Hua University, and BS in EE from the National Taiwan University.
Dr. Yankin Tanurhan
Senior Vice President, Engineering
Synopsys
10:00 - 10:20
AI/ML at the Forefront of Semiconductor Evolution: Enhancing Design, Efficiency, and Performance
As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) drive innovation, their impact on the semiconductor market is transformative. This keynote will explore the latest AI/ML trends and their implications for SoC designs, including how AI/ML algorithms are incorporated into EDA tools to optimize chip design and enable efficient verification and manufacturing. The role of transformer-based neural networks in implementing energy-efficient SoCs will also be discussed.
BIO:
Dr. Yankin Tanurhan is Senior Vice President of Engineering for Processor IP & Tools in the IP Group at Synopsys. The IP products in his portfolio include low-power and high-performance ARC and ARC-V CPUs, NPUs, and DSPs targeting Mobile, IoT, Embedded Vision, AI/ML, Digital Home, Automotive/Industrial and Storage applications. In addition, Dr. Tanurhan is responsible for the ASIP Designer and Programmer tools that are used by SoC developers to create their own custom processors and accelerators.
Dr. Tanurhan has authored 100+ papers in refereed publications. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rheinisch Westfaellische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) in Aachen, Germany and a Dr. Ing. degree summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Eyal Shekel
Senior Vice President
TEL Venture Capital
10:20 - 10:40
TEL VC & Semiconductors Landscape Evolution
A review over the CVC activity, analysis of historical data and potentials for the future.
BIO:
Eyal is over thirty years veteran in the Semiconductors industry.
Upon his graduation as a Mechanical Engineer from the Technion he started his career in a leading semiconductors company. In 1997 he has joined Tokyo Electron, established the subsidiary in Israel, and soon after appointed as the company General Manager.
Since 2005 Eyal has been part of the TEL European senior management, and up to 2019 was responsible for the Service and Support Operations for TEL Europe as a Senior Vice President.
In 2019 Eyal has transferred this responsibility onwards, and is now SVP for Service Strategy and Excellence, with both European and Global challenges. Eyal co-led the corporate Global customer Service organization and is a member of the global sustainability group in TEL Japan. After years of supporting TELVC in Israel, Eyal has joined the TELVC team officially.
10:40 - 11:00
Unlocking the Power of AI in EDA
Lee Harrison
Director Product Marketing Tessent
Siemens EDA
The semiconductor industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, and this growth comes with significant challenges—more design starts, rising design complexities, shorter time-to-market, and a shrinking talent pool. To address these challenges, semiconductor companies are turning to AI-powered EDA solutions. While mainstream AI & GenAI technologies have seen rapid consumer adoption, adapting these AI technologies for EDA use cases is not straightforward due to stringent quality requirements for semiconductor design.
Ideally, EDA AI solutions that provide productivity boosts to chip designers and engineers should (a) seamlessly analyze design and verification data, (b) optimize complex processes, and (c) generate better designs. Across these functional areas, we will discuss illustrative ML, GenAI, and Agentic approaches.
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BIO:
Lee is the Director of Product Marketing Tessent at Siemens Digital Industries Software. He has over 20 years of industry experience with Siemens Tessent test, and safety and security products with a focus on the automotive industry. Lee is working to ensure that current and future test, safety, security and analytics requirements of Siemens’ automotive customers are understood and met.