Synopsys claims to help customers accelerate silicon innovation, reduce risk, and bring increasingly complex AI-driven systems to market faster. In an exclusive interaction, Sudeep Shivalli, Regional Sales Director, GTM, Synopsys India, tells Bhavya Bagga, Business Reporter, CXO Media, how they are embedding AI across their platforms to enable intelligent design exploration, automated optimization, and faster convergence, significantly reducing design complexity and cycle times.
As Regional Senior Director, GTM at Synopsys India, what are the key pillars of Synopsys’ go-to-market (GTM) strategy, and how are they helping accelerate AI-driven semiconductor innovation and customer adoption across India?
We are living in an age of intelligent, pervasive electronic systems, where technology is no longer confined to specific industries but is embedded across every sector, from transportation and consumer devices to aerospace and strategic electronics.
At Synopsys, we see this transformation driven by three powerful, converging forces: artificial intelligence, software-defined systems, and the rapid proliferation of silicon. AI is considerably increasing the demand for advanced compute; software-defined architectures are reshaping how systems evolve; and silicon is becoming the foundational enabler across virtually all industries.
With countries accelerating investments in semiconductor capabilities, there is also a strong global push toward technology sovereignty. While these drivers are universal, each geography is progressing at its own pace based on its ecosystem maturity and strategic priorities.
Our go-to-market strategy at Synopsys is actually closely aligned with these macro trends.
Particularly in India, we are seeing strong momentum around silicon proliferation with innovation accelerating across sectors including transportation, strategic electronics, consumer technology, and aerospace.
We are supporting this progress by empowering our customers with deep ecosystem collaboration, AI-driven design platforms, and scalable innovation frameworks. We are therefore helping them move faster from concept to silicon through a systems-to-silicon approach.
In this AI-driven era, our focus in India ultimately, is on accelerating semiconductor innovation and the democratization of EDA and simulation software.
With AI accelerating chip innovation, how is Synopsys helping semiconductor companies optimize chip design and verification for AI workloads?
AI is essentially reshaping how chips are designed, built, and optimized. Today, companies are reconsidering how they develop design code, build verification environments, and re-architect workflows to drive higher productivity, manage increasing design complexity, and fast-track time-to-market.
Given the momentous investment that is required in advanced semiconductor design, companies are becoming more guarded and are focusing on managing risk and applying AI in a targeted, systemic way, rather than adopting every available solution. As a trusted partner, Synopsys plays a key role here by helping customers address these challenges while mitigating the risks.
We are also now seeing highly compressed innovation cycles, with the industry now targeting as little as 12 months from concept to tape-out to product. This is something that was extremely difficult in the past with traditional approaches.
We call this shift ‘re-engineering engineering’ at Synopsys. By embedding AI across agentic, generative, and predictive capabilities throughout the semiconductor lifecycle, we empower engineers to explore vast design possibilities, optimize power, performance, area, and Multiphysics constraints, and also considerably reduce manual iterations.
Concurrently, AI is also driving demand for a new class of silicon: specialized architectures like NPUs, GPUs, and domain-specific accelerators.
Thus, AI is playing a dual role: Firstly, it is accelerating demand for advanced silicon and secondly, it is transforming how that silicon is created – therefore unlocking a step-change in innovation velocity.
Having over 29 years of experience across engineering, product strategy, and sales, how have you seen AI transform the semiconductor ecosystem?
The central transformation has been that demand has inverted – hyperscalers and OEMs are no longer waiting for standard silicon, but are pulling the ecosystem toward custom and workload-specific architectures. In response, design complexity at advanced nodes and compressed timelines are pushing the limits of traditional approaches.
With AI, the focus has now also shifted from the scale of people to the scale of innovation. Therefore, conversations with customers are evolving from selling tools to solving system-level challenges. And this requires deeper collaboration and expertise.
Technologically, we have shifted from general-purpose computing to specialized AI-driven architectures, and from deterministic engineering to AI-assisted exploration. So, thousands of design possibilities can now be evaluated in a fraction of the time.
We’re also seeing a shift to system-level innovation with chiplets, advanced packaging, and tight hardware-software co-design.
At the end of the day, AI is both the driver and the enabler, thus creating demand for new silicon while transforming how it is designed. In the semiconductor ecosystem, this marks a clear transition from incremental progress to exponential innovation velocity
As Regional Senior Director, GTM at Synopsys India, what are the biggest opportunities you see for India in becoming a global semiconductor and chip design hub?
India has already emerged as a global semiconductor and chip design hub for many of the world’s leading semiconductor companies. Local enterprises now have an opportunity to scale and deliver to global markets, driven by the broader push toward technology sovereignty and the rapid rise of AI-led innovation.
If you look at the last 30 years, Synopsys’ growth in India has closely mirrored the growth of our customers.
Today, many global capability centres based in India are doing cutting-edge design work and contributing to products that are differentiating markets worldwide.
This creates a powerful opportunity not only to participate but also to push the boundaries of advanced silicon design from India. We are now working more closely with these customers to help them move up the value chain – from services work to specialized deep innovation and product leadership.
While the global drivers are consistent, India’s journey is unique, and we are transitioning from a largely services-led model to an innovation-led ecosystem. This shift will take time as enterprises recalibrate their investments based on semiconductor economics and the pace of innovation.
What’s encouraging is the growing momentum around silicon proliferation, supported by national initiatives like Atmanirbhar Bharat, and increasing participation from large enterprises and startups alike.
At Synopsys, our role is to act as a catalyst in this transformation by enabling advanced design capabilities, nurturing startups, supporting skills development, and strengthening ecosystem collaboration.
How is Synopsys leveraging technologies like Generative AI and automation to reduce semiconductor design complexity and speed up silicon innovation?
Markets are evolving quickly with the rise of AI models, particularly open models, which are driving widespread adoption and fundamentally redefining application layers. At Synopsys, we are addressing one of the most complex challenges in technology, which is solving deep physics, NP-hard problems that are inherent in silicon design. This is where Generative AI and automation are playing a massive role across the semiconductor lifecycle.
We are embedding AI across our platforms to enable intelligent design exploration, automated optimization, and faster convergence, significantly reducing design complexity and cycle times.
What’s unique is our ability to bring together EDA, high-quality IP, and advanced simulation and analysis technologies, including capabilities strengthened through Ansys integration, to address challenges not just at the chip level but at the system level.
This convergence is what we call ‘physical AI’, where we model, simulate, and optimize real-world physical behaviours alongside digital, analog, or mixed-signal design.
In the long run, Synopsys is helping customers accelerate silicon innovation, reduce risk, and bring increasingly complex AI-driven systems to market faster.
Given your role in enabling semiconductor ecosystems at scale, what skills should young engineers and AI professionals focus on to succeed in the semiconductor industry?
This is one of the most exciting times for young engineers, as the opportunity space has never been broader. My advice is simple: build strong fundamentals while staying open to cross-disciplinary problem solving. Focus on solving real-world, system-level challenges across AI, electronics, and software-defined systems.
Also, invest in understanding standards, protocols, and system design, because innovation today happens at the intersection of domains. I’d especially encourage engineers in India to work on real, India-centric problems and not just academic projects, but meaningful innovation that is aligned with the growing push from the government.
Eventually, the engineers who stand out will be those who think beyond tools and components and focus on building intelligent systems that solve real-world problems.
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