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Case study · Engineering

Chip design automation

A global semiconductor company

20×faster design turnaround

Client profile

Company
Global semiconductor company, Fortune 500
Team modeled
10 design engineers on the automated flow
Systems
Commercial simulation, synthesis, formal and timing tools; flow scripts; version control; an on-premises compute farm; models hosted inside the company
Constraint
Highly sensitive design data that cannot leave the company

The challenge

What wasn’t working.

Each design change cost an engineer days: write it, simulate it, read the failures, fix them, run it again. Senior engineers were the bottleneck, and most of their time went on iterations rather than decisions. One mistake in silicon can cost millions, so nothing could skip verification, and the design data could not leave the building.

The audit

What we found.

We mapped how one class of design change moved from request to release, step by step, with the engineers who do it.

  • Most of an engineer’s hours on a change went on running and re-running the flow, not on design choices.
  • The same kinds of verification failure came back change after change.
  • Waiting on results stretched each change across days.
  • The rules for fixing common failures lived in senior engineers’ heads, not in the flow.

Engineers were spending their time operating the flow, and too little of it on the decisions only they could make.

What we built

Not one assistant: a team of agents, each with one job, inside a verification gate the company already trusted.

  1. 01

    Agent teams

    Specialized agents plan the change, write the design, write the tests and read the failures, working from the goal and limits an engineer sets.

  2. 02

    A verification gate

    Every result runs through the company’s own simulation, formal and timing checks. Anything that fails goes back to the agents with the reason, automatically, until it passes.

  3. 03

    The engineer decides

    Each result reaches the engineer with its evidence: what changed, what was checked and what passed. Nothing is released without their sign-off.

  4. 04

    Inside the company

    It runs on the company’s own compute, with models hosted inside its walls. The design data never leaves.

What stays with a personThe engineer sets the goal and signs off every result. Verification never gets skipped.

Results

What it returns.

  • 20×

    faster design turnaround

  • 95%

    less engineer time on the automated steps †

  • 100%

    of results verified before an engineer sees them

  • 0

    releases without an engineer’s sign-off

† An estimate, modeled from the client’s own volumes and roles.

The value

$1.4M–$1.7M a year

$200,000 of engineer time freed per engineer a year, from a 20× faster turnaround on the steps the flow automates. Freed time is capacity for more design work, not salary saved.

Value driverAmountHow it is worked out
Engineer time freed on the automated steps $2.0M 10 engineers × $200,000 of engineer time freed each a year
Faster turnaround on the design schedule Not counted Real, but depends on the program
Realized in year one $1.4M–$1.7M Discounted to 70–85%

Value is staff time the work no longer takes, priced at a fully loaded hourly cost and discounted to 70 to 85 percent for partial realization. Revenue gains are left out. We show the arithmetic so you can test it with your own figures.

See how it looks to the team.

A two-minute demo you can click through: one piece of the work, by hand and then with the build. Made-up people, real work.

View the demo

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