Chip Design in the AI Era with Thomas Andersen

Podcast Thursday, May 29 2025

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Synopsys is a leading electronic design automation company specializing in silicon design and verification, as well as software integrity and security. Their tools are foundational to the creation of modern chips and embedded software, powering everything from smartphones to cars.

Chip design is a deeply complex process, often taking months or years and requiring the coordination of thousands of engineers. Now, advances in AI are beginning to transform the field by reducing manual effort, accelerating timelines, and unlocking new design possibilities.

Thomas Andersen is the Vice President of AI and Machine Learning at Synopsys, where he has spent over 15 years. He joins the show to talk with Kevin Ball about the evolving role of AI in hardware design, the challenges of training models on tacit, undocumented chip engineering knowledge, the emergence of domain-specific LLMs, and where this fast-moving field is going next.

Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.

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This episode of Software Engineering Daily is brought to you by Capital One.

How does Capital One stack? It starts with applied research and leveraging data to build AI models. Their engineering teams use the power of the cloud and platform standardization and automation to embed AI solutions throughout the business. Real-time data at scale enables these proprietary AI solutions to help Capital One improve the financial lives of its customers. That’s technology at Capital One.

Learn more about how Capital One’s modern tech stack, data ecosystem, and application of AI/ML are central to the business by visiting www.capitalone.com/tech.