Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss why shift left is pushing beyond verification to system-level validation, and where AI can and cannot help, with Frank Schirrmeister, executive director of strategy programs and system solutions at Synopsys; Ronen Laviv, vice president of business development and strategic partnerships at Hiveware; Jack Berg, vice president of business development at Silvaco; Ashish Darbari, founder and CEO of Axiomise. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one of this discussion, click here.

SE: The focus of shift left in design has largely been about verification. But increasingly it’s also about validation, right?

Darbari: Yes, and it’s influencing huge decisions that could make small companies go bankrupt if they get it wrong. We’ve seen meetings with architects, designers, UVM leads, emulation leads, FPGA and software leads, and VPs, where they’re all looking at bug escapes and asking, ‘Why did this happen?’ The architect is saying, ‘It’s supposed to be this.’ The designer is saying, ‘We didn’t know that.’ The software team says, ‘It’s supposed to be this.’ And we’re sitting there as formal verification people thinking about communication and the model not being accurate, and I don’t know how well we’ll be able to solve this unless we bring the software into the development cycle.

Schirrmeister : It’s not only software. It’s all the other aspects, like multi-physics. EM, thermal, and mechanical, which all have to be integrated. To look at this differently, there are hurdles that I cannot fix in this project.

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