The EDA Primer: From RTL to Silicon
type: NewsArticle
description: The semiconductor industry faces a bottleneck in chip design as AI demand drives increasing complexity, compressed timelines, and a shrinking engineering workforce. Verification now consumes up to 70% of project effort, while design productivity grows at only 20% annually against 50% growth in chip complexity. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software has become essential to translate human intent into manufacturable silicon, as the industry can no longer rely on hiring more engineers or buying more servers to keep pace.
date published: 2026-05-12 02:32:14+00:00
date modified: 2026-05-28 02:08:22.223293+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: # The EDA Primer: From RTL to Silicon ### Laying the Groundwork of the Current Chip Design Paradigm AI demand has been driving the explosion in compute over the past few years, resulting in chip designs getting ever more complex, with silicon area and power per package seeing continued growth as designs push for even greater performance. With each successive generation, new process nodes with more design rules and restrictions further increase chip design costs. At the same time, the rush to bring compute into the market as quickly as possible has put design teams under immense pressure to compress timelines and speed up validation cycles from years to months. If you’re not fast, you will get lapped up and beaten by your competitors. Even a 3 month delay means billions of dollars. All this is happening while the engineering talent base is shrinking. Lucrative salaries and flexible working arrangements have enticed most students into the Software and Information Systems tracks, resulting in a dwindling number of Electrical Engineer graduates that could enter the chip design workforce. Siemens presented the engineer-hours demanded of these numerous complex AI accelerator designs that far outstrip the engineering talent coming into the workforce. One-third of the current U.S. semiconductor workforce is over 55. The pipeline of new graduates is nowhere close to filling that gap. Even Apple is actively funding education programs to encourage uptake in engineering. While their New Silicon Initiative has contributed to increasing interest and number of EE graduates, it barely moves the needle compared to the explosion in manpower requirements as transistor count grows at a Moore’s Law pace. With this trifecta of increasing chip complexity, compressed design timelines and a shortage of engineers, a massive bottleneck has formed at the design stage. The latest AMD MI455X packs 320 billion transistors across 12 logic dies on 2nm and 3nm processes with advanced Hybrid Bonding …
publisher: Web Pulse
keywords: ai-chips, artificial-intelligence, ai-infrastructure
mentions: Siemens
mentions: Apple
citation: CreativeWork