AsFigo - enabling opensource chip design and verification.

We opened our DVCon US ’26 Birds of a Feather session with the most electrifying—and anxious—question in the industry today: Is AI going to take your engineering job? To answer this, we turned to Clifford Cummings , world-renowned HDL Synthesis trainer, and Yatin Trivedi . Their consensus was a much-needed reality check: The tools are changing rapidly, but the need for fundamental engineering expertise is more critical than ever. The Trust Gap and the Junior Engineer Dilemma One of the biggest risks discussed in the panel is the assumption of correctness. AI tools can, and often do, get things "completely wrong." There is a growing concern that junior engineers, impressed by the speed of generative AI, often assume the output is correct and submit it without proper verification. This creates a dangerous Trust Gap . You cannot fix what you do not understand. Maintaining a strong foundational background in chip design is absolutely essential to identify, de...

In our previous installment, we looked at the brutal $10-per-query economics of AI-EDA. But even if the cost of inference drops to near zero, a deeper technical question remains: Can you actually trust the answer? Continuing our series from the DVCon US ’26 Birds of a Feather session, Yatin Trivedi , Head, Semiconductor Center of Excellence (CoE) at Capgemini Engineering, shared the results of a high-stakes experiment that serves as a reality check for the industry’s "AI-everything" race. It highlights a massive maturity gap that every verification lead needs to understand before they integrate LLMs into their sign-off flow. The Experiment: Grading the Plan Yatin’s team conducted a controlled trial: they took a final design specification and a manually crafted, human-verified verification plan. They then asked four leading AI platforms to "grade" that plan for completeness. Could the AI identify gaps in the testing strategy before tape-out? I...

This first installment of our DVCon US ’26 video series dives straight into a reality check that often gets lost in the hype of generative AI: The cost of a single "thought." In this segment, Srini (AsFigo) sits down with Asif ETV (HPCINFRA) to discuss why the transition to AI-native chip design isn't just a software challenge—it’s a massive infrastructure and economic hurdle. Watch the Full Segment :  In this 3-minute clip, watch Asif and Srini break down the economic reality of the modern AI-EDA stack and why optimizing for the right infrastructure is the only way to stay within budget while bringing AI into production. The Cost Explosion: Doing the Math on Hallucinations When we talk about "Agentic AI" in EDA, we imagine autonomous loops of design and verification. But as Asif ETV points out, the meter is always running, and it’s running faster than many teams realize. Sharing a startling metric from recent infrastructure experiments, the m...

If you missed the Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at DVCon US '26 in Santa Clara, hosted by AsFigo , you missed a critical conversation about the structural barrier facing silicon design: AI is currently too expensive to fail. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become proficient at generating Verilog syntax, the industry is hitting a wall we call the $100k AI-EDA Bottleneck . To move from "cool demos" to production-ready chip design collaterals (RTL, SVA, UVM, SDC, Synthesis, Physical design scripts all the way upto GDS-II), we must solve the hallucination problem without bankrupting the project on EDA licenses. The Problem: The "EDA License Tax" on Reasoning Agentic AI—systems that autonomously iterate on design and verification—thrives on a "Trial-Error-Correct" loop. An agent might require thousands of simulation or linting runs to prune logic hallucinations and refine a complex IP block. In a traditional workflow, every on...