Author: Siemens Digital Industries Software
The EDA sector faces significant challenges: design complexity is constantly increasing, while product timelines are becoming ever shorter. At the same time, engineering departments are facing a critical talent shortage, as the number of available engineers is dwindling.
But challenges also bring opportunities. The European Chip Act demonstrates Europe's willingness to seize this moment. The aim is to relocate the semiconductor supply chain to remain globally competitive and strengthen European sovereignty in this sector.
Therefore, it's no coincidence that chip designers are gathering at a conference in the heart of Europe to discuss how to address these challenges. In Munich, Siemens EDA – an international company with European roots – is hosting User2User, a conference where designers from across Europe present their projects, share best practices, and learn about and promote the latest industry trends.
An informational exchange on the leadership panel: Sean Redmond, Silicon Catalyst Europe, AJ Incorvaia, Abhi Kolpekwar and Geoff Lee, Siemens EDA (from left to right)
Going a step further in the approach shift-left
One of these trends is the ongoing shift from hardware-centric to software-defined design. At the User2User leadership panel, AJ Incorvaia, senior vice president and general manager of Electronic Board Systems at Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software, explained the increased complexity of development today. Products now consist of multiple systems, and the growing number of functions encapsulated in smaller spaces raises power and signal integrity challenges. Therefore, it is more important than ever to detect problems as early as possible. The approach «shift-left"It is becoming essential in development and has now reached the point where software development must begin in parallel with hardware development."
Abhi Kolpekwar, senior vice president and general manager of Digital Verification Technologies at Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software, adds that conventional verification can no longer keep pace with today's ever-increasing demands and the ever-more complex behavior of modern products. Therefore, verification must be integrated into the development process from the outset and extend throughout the entire product lifecycle, generating enormous amounts of data. This requires a fundamental shift from a one-dimensional to a holistic approach.
This is just one example of the growing importance of AI in development. However, simply integrating AI into existing tools is not enough to meet future challenges. On the contrary, AI must be incorporated from a very early stage so that hardware and software cease to be seen as separate entities and become a unified whole.
Jean-Marie Saint-Paul, Senior Vice President of EDA Global Sales at Siemens EDA, demonstrates how Siemens EDA supports the startups in Europe.
Native AI tools for efficient designers
With native AI tools, design teams will be much more productive. Siemens EDA aims to follow this path with its portfolio of solutions, which ranges from integrated circuit design to verification and board systems: a unified, AI-native, software-defined, and silicon-enabled design paradigm will enable faster tools and more productive engineers.
AJ Incorvaia emphasizes that the value of AI does not lie in "not to replace engineers, but to help them be as productive as possible." This begins with the initial implementation and continues with the optimal use of tools, especially those that designers use infrequently. AI contributes to this through command prediction and natural language assistance.
Furthermore, Abhi Kolpekwar advocates for what he calls "verification confidence." AI should assist developers by automating, accelerating, and optimizing processes. It should not be used to replace human judgment. Engineers must always maintain control and be able to understand the results of AI.
The main presentations and parallel sessions of User2User aroused great interest.
collaboration and startups
But innovations cannot mature in isolation. In today's world, progress can only be achieved through collaboration with customers, partners, and the wider industry. The third speaker, Geoff Lee, Vice President of Sales for EMEA at Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software, also points out that collaboration within the sector has been increasing in recent years, a trend that is accelerating across all companies.
For Siemens EDA, this collaboration also extends to supporting the startupsAt User2User, the company announced that it is the first EDA provider to sign a strategic framework agreement with the EU Chips Joint Undertaking (Chips JU) for Euro CDP (European Chips Design Platform). This allows companies selected for the Chips JU program to access Siemens' EDA software at predetermined prices and terms. This creates a level playing field: startupsSMEs and researchers have access to the same tools as industry giants.
"After funding, the availability of tools is a key factor for the success of a startup“Strengthening Europe’s position as a business hub is also one of his personal goals in his new role as Senior Vice President of EDA Global Sales at Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software, a position he recently assumed.”
Karima Dridi, Vice President of Productivity Engineering at Arm, used her opening presentation to show how Siemens EDA has contributed to the development of the ARM AGI CPU.
Industry leaders use Siemens EDA
To maintain its competitiveness on the global stage and ensure its sovereignty, it will be necessary to foster the development of a greater number of high-value companies this decade. Sean Redmond, president of Silicon Catalyst Europe, a semiconductor startup accelerator, also emphasized this point as moderator of the User2User leadership panel: “In Europe, the stakes have never been higher.”
Arm®, one of the few high-value companies to have emerged in Europe in recent decades, is a role model for the European ecosystem of startupsIt is therefore not surprising that Siemens EDA invited her to give one of the two opening presentations at User2User.
Karima Dridi, Vice President of Productivity Engineering at Arm®, explains how the rise of AI is generating massive amounts of data. To address this, Arm® has just introduced the AGI CPU, developed using Siemens EDA's agentic AI and tools. And Karima Dridi is convinced that AI will continue to play an increasingly important role in development: "This is just the beginning."
In the second presentation, another industry leader addresses his collaboration with Siemens EDA. Dr. John Linford, Director of Industrial Engineering at NVIDIA®, emphasizes the importance of physics for AI. Physics enables the creation of digital twins, essential for the co-design of software and hardware. John Linford considers this the beginning of the "era of physical AI," as he calls it.
John Linford explains how his company supports this trend: GPU-accelerated solvers and physically AI-based surrogate models can be integrated into CAE and EDA environments to dramatically shorten iteration cycles, while agentic AI systems, such as Siemens' Fuse EDA AI, coordinate complex workflows, allowing experts to remain focused on engineering decisions.
Dr. John Linford, Director of Industrial Engineering at NVIDIA, demonstrated NVIDIA's efforts to create more efficient AI systems to support designers.
How Siemens EDA helps engineers
Several customer and user presentations have highlighted the use of agentic AI systems in their respective development projects. Companies such as Infineon®, Intel®, and STMicroelectronics® share how they use agentic AI in their applications and the results they have already achieved.
In particular, Sathishkumar Balasubramanian, Product Manager, EDA AI, at Siemens EDA, demonstrated the benefits of the Siemens EDA AI ecosystem in his closing presentation. He showed how agentic orchestration ensures that AI supports and autonomously controls complete design workflows.
Through concrete examples, it illustrates how a design engineer working with Siemens EDA tools can integrate silicon design with systems simulation, manufacturing, and lifecycle management. Each domain clearly demonstrates how agentic AI eliminates manual intervention while improving outcomes, both within the tool and across the entire Siemens EDA portfolio.
Taken together, these capabilities demonstrate how Siemens' EDA tools help developers and designers do their jobs even better, which is important for the entire industry in Europe. Or, as Sean Redmond, moderator of the leadership panel, tells the audience: "The future is in your hands."
I visited the User2User content library to access the general sessions, keynote speeches and roundtables of the User2User event series, which brings together the electronic design automation (EDA) community to share their practical experiences with Siemens EDA tools.
