Maheen Hamid is co-founder of electronic design automation (EDA) company Breker Verification Systems and a member of both the ESD Alliance Governing Council and the SEMI North America Advisory Board. She is also a passionate supporter of the semiconductor industry’s design sector and believes it is often overlooked and undervalued.
I recently spoke with Hamid about the EDA industry and her perspectives on the sector where electronics begins.
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Smith: How do you define the design sector?
Hamid: When I think of design, I marvel at how small the EDA space is compared to the rest of the electronics supply chain. Every piece of equipment on the manufacturing floor is controlled by a chip or multiple chips designed and verified by hardware engineers using design tools. The semiconductor ecosystem is ever more interdependent.
In many ways, design and EDA define the success of the entire supply chain. How does this happen? The process of building a chip incorporates many stages, and the design stage comes first. The functional design of the increasingly complex chips incorporates every tiny detail of the chip/systems specification (what is it supposed to do?) to its verification (can it do what it’s supposed to do?). And that’s before it enters the phase of physical design that maps out the transformation and implementation of the functional design onto a physical chip. This is followed by prototyping and validation, which eventually leads to manufacturing and packaging.
Within this long, complex flow, the design category focuses on the buckets of logic design and verification, physical design, and building the embedded software stack and validation after initial prototyping.
Smith: Why does electronics begin with design?
Hamid: As human beings evolve in how much we push the boundaries and integrate the use of technology in our daily lives, the brain of this evolution lies in complex chips or systems on chips. As we multiply and accelerate the pace of innovation in devices and end applications of technology, the uncluttered function of this brain becomes critical.
In an everyday example, we can try to imagine the traffic jam created in electronic signals when trying to load a function on a phone app while many others like maps, location and streaming services are running in the background, as we rush to take a photo of a fading sunset just as an international call gets connected on the phone. All of these tasks and how they are handled and managed are regulated by chips in the phone.
The ever-increasing intricacies of chip design require careful planning and is analogous to cities that are lauded for their urban planning versus poorly planned ones that lead to chaos and decay as the population grows. Without a well-defined design that has been tested for its planned functionalities and is followed by a mapping of the most efficient and economic implementation of the design, the industry cannot scale.
Every spin of a chip due to functional flaws is expensive, both in materials and in time lost. There is only so much that can be patched via software. Preserving natural resources – with future buffers in mind for the exponential growth in chip production and planning for present and future manufacturing capacity – presupposes a blind trust in a strong design stage. Hence, having due emphasis and an understanding of the design category is critical for the electronics industry.
Smith: What would the semiconductor industry look like without a design tools and services category?
Hamid: The design component is like the salt in the folklore of the king who asked his daughters to explain how dear he was to them, and the youngest’s understated response of “as dear as salt” was dismissed until its importance is realized. When the king is forced to have his elaborate meals minus this innocuous ingredient, he understands how much he has taken it for granted. Similarly, even though the design community is a fraction of the entire electronics supply chain, it is like the salt without which the rest of the supply chain – i.e. the far more impressive looking parts of the feast – cannot be savored.
Smith: Where has design made the biggest impact?
Hamid: Perhaps a better question is where would the semiconductor industry and its supply chain be without design and EDA?
Design and EDA have played a critical role in getting increasingly complex chips out to market on time. It continues on this path as it helps to enable a frantic pace of innovation in the electronics industry, including the current growth in artificial intelligence (AI) and its various applications.
Smith: What aspects of the development process are the most important and/or complex?
Hamid: Historically, depending on the source, the verification and validation budget comprises 60%-70% of development costs in the design phase. Within that range, generating sufficient test content, understanding coverage and debug alone represent about 60% of the verification challenge.
Pushing the boundaries of imagination of what a chip can do seems to be easier than making sure that it will be able to do.
Smith: Given that the design category keeps evolving and adapting to meet the needs of the semiconductor industry, where do you see it going?
Hamid: EDA and the design community thrive on the mantra: Cheaper, Faster, Better. There is no other reason for design tools and services to exist. EDA companies continue to drive internal innovation to deliver on this promise to their customers.
With AI and the beginnings of the next paradigm shift in the industry, we are already seeing .ai instead of .com tacked on design tool companies promising greater productivity from AI-based design tools. I am undecided on whether it’s an indicator of fear of missing out (FOMO) and a public relations ploy, or if design tool companies are really creating large language models (LLMs) to spit out credible, scalable, transformable outputs that disintermediates an experienced engineer at the customer site.
I think we will see a hybrid conclusion where certain intuitive tasks and decision making – i.e. the art of chip design – will always require a human at its helm. The design category will continue to evolve and expand automation within the design and verification flow.
About Maheen Hamid
Maheen Hamid is the co-founder, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Breker Verification Systems. Hamid has a wealth of financial engineering experience from investment banking and small business management in diverse industries. She has been instrumental in establishing Breker as an important stakeholder in the EDA industry. Hamid holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from North South University in Bangladesh and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Robert (Bob) Smith is Executive Director of the ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community.
